


The Darkest Wizard This Side of the Multiverse

by mistermisstep



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Breaking the Fourth Wall, Certain Tags and Pairings Unlisted Due to Spoilers, Dark, Drama, F/M, Fantasy, Hogwarts University, Mentally Ill Character(s), Slytherin Harry, Unreliable Narrator, Writing Crackfic Seriously
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-27
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-07 17:04:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11627967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mistermisstep/pseuds/mistermisstep
Summary: What would really happen if a Slytherin Harry Potter became super independent, super powerful, and super dangerous, as narrated by his personal — and very grudging — minion, the marginally sane Violet Henry. Also features Snape, the world's worst mentor. (Dark!Harry, AU, dark comedy elements, no Harry/Snape.)





	1. The Awful Tea Party Part I

o

**Chapter One**

o

The Awful Tea Party Part I

o

It was a good life, the one that I had. Not a particularly interesting one, mind you, but still good. Okay, it was boring as hell if I'm honest, but it was mine. And my life stopped being mine the instant that Harry Potter pulled me into his world.

The worst part of it, the one that really pisses me off, is that I hadn't asked for it. During no part of my last day in a normal universe did I bemoan my fate, curse my ordinariness, or look to the sky hoping that someone, anyone, would take me away on an improbable adventure. Those kinds of things didn't happen in the real world, so I'd long stopped wishing for them. That's what growing up is. And sure, that's lousy, but it's life. You work with what you have. What _I_ had was an affordable studio apartment; Fyodor, a boyfriend who was sweet and steady; and a mind-numbing career as a market research analyst who sidelined as a cover-story inventor for a married boss who everyone knew was slipping it to the HR lady during lunchtime.

Not extraordinary. Not special. Not magical. But all of that was real and it was good.

And then I stepped into a supply closet to get some toner because no one else could figure out how to refill the communal printer despite the instructions being taped to the side two years ago by _someone_ who was tired of staining her fingers black, and found myself in a dim, candlelit room filled with stale air and the thick scent of blood. Sitting cross-legged on the stone floor was a thin young man with black hair. He was holding a yellow-paged tome so large that it seemed to take all his effort to keep it upright. And I knew him. From the eyeglasses to the lightning-shaped scar on his head, I knew him. You'd know him too, provided you're a fan of popular fantasy novels. This was a face that I had seen while reading book after book in one particular series, a face that had been locked in my mind, a face that was like that of a familiar friend.

The one thing out of place was the Slytherin crest on his school robes. Why was he wearing robes like that when he looked only a few years younger than me? He was well past Hogwarts age.

Oh, and that body in the center of the salt circle was unexpected too. It might have frightened me more if I hadn't sat on the grimy floor rocking myself, convinced that I finally had some kind of boredom-induced break with reality. Twenty-six was too young for such shit.

The man watched me sob and beg for someone to take me to a hospital. He really was a man. Twenty or twenty-one, maybe. Hard to tell through the blur of tears. A kid of his age shouldn't have looked so ... detached. God, it was bad enough that I'd had a breakdown, but had it really needed to involve the _Harry Potter_ series? A non-canon version of it at that? And why Slytherin Harry, of all the cliches? Couldn't it have been, I don't know, Hufflepuff Harry? A Hufflepuff wouldn't have made what looked like a summoning circle and engage in probable human sacrifice. Or maybe he would have. You never knew with the nice ones. Fuck, my imagination really had got away with me. Mom was right. Shouldn't have had my nose in books all the time. Look where it had got me. I strangled down a panicked laugh. The sound squeaked through my teeth anyway.

His gaze shifted to snare mine. It was cold and sharp, yet curious. That curiosity seemed worse than the detachment, as if he'd found an interesting Flobberworm that he wanted to dissect. No one should wear an expression like that. It was too empty. "What's so funny?" he said in a soft voice devoid of emotion.

"Everything," I said. That sounded whiny. Tearful. Christ, this really was a breakdown. Karen from HR was going to waddle over to see why I hadn't come back with the toner and find me blubbering. Maybe she already had. Maybe the ambulance was on its way and the EMTs were readying the sedatives. So I might as well explain myself while I could. This figment of my imagination wouldn't last much longer, so there was no harm in furthering the conversation. Modern medicine could do a lot for sick people. "I have gone insane," I explained, "and I am talking to someone who isn't real."

He stretched out his long legs on the blanket beneath him. Tendons in one of them popped, as if it'd been kept crossed for too long. He shifted the heavy book in his hands. Read. Turned a page. Turned another. Frowned. Traced a scarred finger down the thick paper. What the hell had happened to his hands to scar them like that? "Are you a Squib?" A pause. "No, Americans call them Defects, don't they?"

"What?" Right, this was a themed breakdown, wasn't it? Squibs. I knew what those were. "No, I'm not anything like that."

Pleasure flashed across his face, startling compared to its former blankness. He quickly schooled his features. "Excellent." He flipped another page. "How closely are you related to the Evanses? You must be a cousin. A second or third one, perhaps ..."

"I'm not related to any Evanses."

Now annoyance flashed on his face. It stuck there. "Then what are you? A Muggle-born? No, wrong term — Were you born of Blights?"

"I'm a Henry. Violet Henry."

"With no relation to anyone named Evans? I find that difficult to believe after the little ritual that I've done."

My gaze drifted to the body not half a foot in front of me. "What have you done?"

"Summoned a witch or wizard of my blood to me." He saw where I was looking. His resulting smile was thin and nasty. He set aside the book. "Don't look so upset. The man had been a Muggle. A perverted one at that. Wanted to buy 'my time' for a hundred pounds. When I had refused to give it, he tried to take it, so I cut his short instead ... along with another small thing of his." My gaze darted away from the bloody spot on the body's trousers. Potter's smile popped up again, thinner and nastier. "If he hadn't been rough with me, I would've just been on my merry way and he would've been alive."

The dead guy had been a pervert? If this hallucination was anything like the countless Slytherin Harrys in countless fan fictions, then it'd be hard to trust anything he was saying. Those types were always unrepentant liars. Then again, he was a product of my broken brain. He couldn't hurt me. I was fine. I was safe. I was real. He wasn't. The power was with me, not him. I uncurled from the floor. Sat up. Brushed loose hair behind my ears. "Where I come from," I said, "there are no witches or wizards."

He grabbed his wand from where it had been sitting beside him. Rolled it idly in a hand. "Forgive me if I don't believe you."

"It's true."

"You know what a Squib is."

I sighed. Hallucinations shouldn't argue. "Because it's in a book," I said. "A series of books. You're just a character in them — one who's Gryffindor, by the way, not Slytherin."

His amusement dissolved into distaste. There was anger too in his thinning mouth and his narrowing eyes. He said, "It seems that we'll have to discover the truth the hard way," and pointed his wand at my face. " _Legilimens_."

What followed was a pain that I couldn't have anticipated. It wasn't physical. But it hurt in ways that I had never been hurt before. Ways that would still hurt hours later. They'd hurt for the rest of my life. It's hard to tell you what that was like. Maybe you know. But I hope that you don't. I hope that the world has changed for those reading this chronicle. Let's pretend that it has changed, that you don't know the touch of an Unforgivable. So how can I let you know what it's like to have Potter in your mind?

Oh, wait. I think have the right comparison. Have you ever had a diary? A journal? Something that you kept from all the world and filled with your observations, your dreams, your secrets?

Did anyone ever read that diary?

It's awful, that kind of violation, isn't it? Someone else knowing your deepest and most private thoughts. Doesn't matter how irrelevant they are. You wrote them down and locked them away for a reason. The reason could be as simple as those thoughts just being yours. No one has the right to go through them. They shouldn't want to have that right. Everyone deserves privacy and trust.

Legilimency gives you neither. That spell is an intruding hand that cuts the lock on the diary of your mind, slices out the pages, and reshuffles them in its ceaseless, restless hunt for whatever secrets it wishes to find. Occlumency is the only thing that can slap that hand aside.

But I didn't have Occlumency then.

There had been no such thing as magic in my world. You can't defend against a weapon that doesn't exist. I sat helpless as he tore through my entire life. And I mean _helpless_. Active Legilimency, I would later learn, was a different beast from passive Legilimency. The second one happens when a practitioner of the art silently uses his skill to skim surface thoughts from the eyes of other people. It's not particularly strong, so an Occlumens of passable skill can deflect such intrusions without any real effort. Active Legilimency doesn't skim, it invades. You feel it slithering into your thoughts, rifling, exploring, tainting. It stirs up memories like ghosts, resuscitating their accompanying emotions. It suspends its victim between past and present, paralyzing them with the weight of remembering.

No Legilimens, no matter his skill, can pick one memory at a time, can be careful, can find exactly what he wants on the first try. And sometimes, like Potter, they just want to crack open your skull and see the insides.

Here was the disappointment when my family forgot to call on my birthday two months ago. There, connected to it by a skein of anger was a memory of my mother texting to say that _it's your sister's birthday two weeks from now, don't forget!_ Here was me on a three-nights-in-a-row crying jag when I thought that Fyodor was cheating on me, and God, I'm so lonely, why hasn't he come over in three weeks? He can't be that busy. Is there someone else? Oh, that's stupid, he's too nice to cheat. Just imagining things, like always ... Here was last Christmas. No, the Christmas before. No, no, no, the Christmas when I was five and Grandma got me that book. Books. Always liked books. Books like the one _he'd_ come from. Here was another book from another time and another and another, so many titles passing by until there was one called _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone._ Another memory, of a later edition with the original title floated in the back of my mind like a phantom, then dissipated. The memories of my first reading of that first book cascaded through me. Then the second book. The third. The fourth.

The fourth. We lingered together on the fourth. Alastor Moody's face, craggy and ugly, filled my head. Then another man's face, one that was slender and freckled and hollow-cheeked. Barty Crouch Jr. The faces that I had imagined them having. But the face that was lingered on the longest was always that of Harry Potter. Harry in the _Order of the Phoenix_ , Harry in the _Half-Blood Prince_ , Harry in _Deathly Hallows_. I saw him again and again and again until the haze of memory retreated and we were left staring at each other.

He had gone bloodless. His wand arm trembled. He finally human. What had turned him so inhuman in the first place? No. Nothing had turned him into anything. He was not real. This was a hallucination. A psychotic break. _Shit, that isn't a comfort. Maybe it'd be better if this was real. At least then I wouldn't be crazy._

He licked at the sweat gathered on his upper lip. "I am not a character in a book," he said, lowering his wand, "but you _are_ mad."

"Yeah, I'd have to be to think you're real," I said.

"No." He ran a hand through his sweat-dampened hair. "That's not what had turned you mad."

"What did then?"

"You can't have forgotten that, no matter how mental you are."

"Forgotten what, exactly?"

Disgust laced his disappointment. He took off his eyeglasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. After a moment, he dropped his hand and slipped his glasses into a pocket of his robes. He stood with the muscular fluidity of an uncoiling snake. "I have work to do."

My hallucination-induced host was no stranger to corpse cleanup. He didn't flinch when he levitated the body out of the circle. He took it through the long, low room and out a door that opened with his approach. He paused on the threshold, the body hovering ahead of him. Without turning around, he said, "Don't kill yourself during my absence or else I'll have to murder another Muggle. You wouldn't want that on your conscience would you?"

He left and the door locked itself in a turn of great, clanking tumblers. I got up. Not in a panic. There was nothing I could do about all this, so I might as well explore until the psychiatrists and their drugs got hold of me. The lines of the summoning circle didn't keep me from crossing them. Once beyond the wavering light of the candles that were positioned around that circle, the rest of the room was easier to see. It looked like a basement. What else could it be without windows, really?

Against a shorter wall opposite the door and behind the circle was what looked like a potions crafting station. On the long wall to its right was a door that proved locked, though by leaning up I could see through the window placed high at the top half. There were shelves inside the room, many of them, all lined with jars, boxes, and phials of what looked like potions ingredients. Interesting, but not extraordinary. Further along that same wall and to my right, were bookshelves. Lots of them. Few books, though. Some were in English, others Latin. In the corner nearest the big metal door that Potter had gone through — it was difficult to think of him as plain old Harry, bastard that he was — was a small, square area cordoned off with battered, wooden screens. A peek behind them revealed a neat bed, a trunk, and a small table with a few books on it. He seemed to be living here, wherever "here" was. The other long wall had two doors, the first of which led to a bathroom with a separate water closet and the second of which was a large storeroom filled with odds and ends. More than a peek in the storeroom seemed like prying, but the bathroom was useful, so in I went.

"Don't you just look horrid!" said a scolding voice.

I jumped.

The source of the voice was a mirror hanging over the sink — although I suppose that'd properly be called a basin if this dream-hallucination-whatever was set in Britain. My reflection wasn't lying; I did look awful. Sweaty, pale, drawn. My bangs were plastered to my forehead with sweat. The rest of my hair wasn't much better. I fixed the tangles as best I could with my fingers since there wasn't a brush or comb lying around. Not that I would've used them. Using other people's brushes was weird. My face was an easier fix. Just a little cold water from the tap, a pat of a towel hanging from a hook next to the sink, and my skin felt fresher. The clothes were a different matter. Landing and then lying on the floor had dirtied them. Ugh, the skirt was a hopeless case. So grimy. These were my best work clothes too. Would it have killed him to clean the floors around here?

The great tumblers turned again, so I rushed out of the bathroom.

Potter returned to the room, the door closing behind him. He had come alone. His school robes were absent, however, leaving him wearing trousers, a blazer, and one of those cardigan vests over his shirt and tie. A school uniform, this one also with a Slytherin crest. The ensemble was vaguely Tom Riddle-ish. In fact, he looked something like the Riddle I had imagined reading about, but that resemblance between them was canon and not my tendency for bullshit symbolism controlling this situation. The question was if the resemblance ran to personality and not just looks. Well, it must have, considering the dead body. Maybe the real question was to ask how deep the resemblance was. The only way to find the answer would be by testing the boundaries of this hallucination.

"What did you do with the dead guy?" I said.

He strode past me, taking his wand from an inside pocket of his blazer. How had that fit in there? Stupid question. Magic, obviously. "Do you really want to know or are you just politely inquiring after my hobbies?" he said.

"Both, I guess."

Potter waved his wand and the salt circle disappeared. Maybe he'd Vanished it. Neat trick. Maybe he could be convinced to get the grime off my poor, innocent clothes. "The less you know about it, the better." He sent the candles flying into metal sconces set at intervals on the stone walls. "Suffice it to say that it has been adequately disposed of." He turned to face me. "Do you feel sorry for the man?"

"It's hard to feel too sorry for a construct of my subconscious."

That answer wiped away his neutral expression, replacing it with something dark. "Stop talking like that."

"Why? Does the truth hurt?"

Some emotion flickered in his eyes and was gone too fast for me to catch it. "It's not the truth," he said, "and if you keep spouting it, someone other than me might someday overhear it, and you'll end up in hospital where you won't be of use to me."

"What use could you have for me?"

"You're to be my guardian."

It was likely a bad idea to say no to him — he had just got rid of a body — but I was still stupid enough to say the first thing that came to mind. "You're a little old for that, aren't you?"

His lips pressed together. "It's a pity about your madness, but I suppose that I can work around that."

"God, that sounds so Slytherin ... This is _really_ AU."

Now his lips disappeared. With what seemed like a titanic effort, he finally said, "What does that mean?"

"It means that some explanation would be nice, like telling me why you need a guardian at your age."

He said, "Yes, I suppose that some explanation shall be necessary."

Potter Conjured a table and a set of chairs. He then brought a full tea service out of seemingly thin air, much in the way that meals were served by house-elves. Maybe it was some variety of Summoning Charm. There were little cakes on a three-tiered tray and everything. Fancy. Not that I'd say so — it'd make me sound like a tourist visiting a London tearoom. Incidentally, that was probably where he had got it from. It was hard to imagine that he was the sort of guy who kept an extravagant tea setup lying around for potential guests. Potter jabbed his wand at me a few times, using two spells that cleaned me up and tidied my hair, and a harmless flash of foggy white light that didn't seem to do much of anything at all.

He gestured for me to sit down, which I did. Might as well. A dream couldn't _really_ hurt me, and other than that whole invading my mind thing he had been somewhat civilized. Well, not to the dead guy. But to me? Yeah. Plus the tiny cakes looked good. He served the tea, then floated the sugar and lemon slices my way. When we had finished fixing our drinks to our respective tastes, the hovering dishes and spoons settled onto the table. We drank a while before he said anything else. "You understand the generalities of the magical world, if not the specifics," he said. "I suppose that we have your addled mind to thank for that."

I reached for a mini-tart that might've been lemon. "Addled is a little harsh." Tasting the tart, I found that it was lemon. And delicious. "What don't I understand, then?"

Potter set his teacup to its saucer, then placed both on the table. "You're taking all this surprisingly well."

I shrugged. "As far as nightmares go, I've had worse ones."

He took a cake off the bottom tier, one that looked interesting. "Shall I frighten you, then?"

"No, I'm good." Besides, he'd already frightened me. I nodded at what he'd just taken. "What is that?"

"Seed cake."

"Any good?"

"It should be, considering the prices of the tearoom I had just pilfered it from." He levitated the plate my way, then tended to his cup again. "Please, help yourself."

I did, and then the plate settled back to the table. The seed cake was better than good. My imagination was working overtime on this hallucination. "So, that's your deal? Stealing things?"

He frowned over his delicate white teacup. "My 'deal?' "

"Your thing ... your ..." No, that was less helpful, not more. "It's part of your characterization, I guess I'd say."

His cup struck his saucer with a loud clink. "I am not a character." He was holding his cup so tightly that it looked as if it was close to being shattered. "You are not allowed to say that I am, or that anyone else you meet is one. In fact, you are not allowed to mention any of your delusions to anyone save me. Is that clear?"

It didn't matter if the lead character was Voldemort or Harry, I'd read plenty of Dark Arts fics to know where this was going. "Let me guess," I said, "if I go against your orders, you'll use the Cruciatus Curse as motivation? You do know that's the refuge of shitty fan fiction Dark Wizards, don't you?"

"No," he said, finally bringing up his cup. It was a long drink. "I've always found that particular curse a blunt tool compared to the delicate instrument that is the Imperius Curse. It's an insidious spell, one that you can't truly recognize when it's cast upon you. Of course, that changes when you've been commanded to do something that's against your nature to do." He set everything aside and picked up his napkin to blot his mouth. "Put your plate down, pick up your knife, and hold it three inches away from the center of your right eye — assuming that is your dominant eye. Is it?"

I did as he asked. He'd done it so politely that refusing him seemed silly. He wouldn't ask me to do anything to hurt myself. Even if he did, it didn't matter. This wasn't real. The knife didn't quiver in my hand. Oh, I was being rude. I hadn't answered him yet. "Yes," I said, "my right eye is my dominant one."

He selected a scone from the tower of food. Set it on his plate. "It would be a shame to lose that one, I should think."

I frowned. He wasn't asking anything of me. He should. "Do you want me to agree?"

"Your agreement doesn't matter," he said. He took up his knife and split open his scone. "What I want you to do is slowly move the knife towards the corner of your eye — the inner corner with the tear duct — until the tip of it rests against the flesh between that corner and your nose."

That wasn't very much to ask and it wasn't very much to do. We weren't friends, but he was Harry Potter. He wouldn't hurt anyone without good reason. That Muggle had died because he had got rough with Harry. Me, I was a different case. I was useful to him. Even if I wasn't, it didn't matter. This wasn't real.

He spread clotted cream on one half of his scone, jam on the other. The second looked like a streak of gore. "Now," he said, "I'm going to tell you how to gouge out your eye and you're going to live to regret it."

The request was awful enough to make my knife-hand waver. But it didn't matter. This wasn't real.

o

(Oh, but the pain was.)

o

An eternity later, he Vanished my blood off me, my clothes, and the otherwise pristine white tablecloth. "You should finish your tea," he said, leaving my side to return to his chair. "The leaves have a mild calming effect to them that unfolds over time, one that is aided by the caffeine." He set his wand next to his plate, within easy reach.

My hands stayed firmly on the table. I wasn't doing a thing that he told me, not now. "Fuck you."

He took a bite of his scone. Jam flecked his lips like blood; he licked it away. "Is that the first thing that you have to say after I so kindly released you from my curse?"

"Fuck you sideways."

Another bite. "You could at least thank me for putting your eye back in place. It was tricky work after you had sliced it into such uneven pieces." He traded his food for his cup. After drinking deeply of his tea, he said, "As I was saying, you shall not mention your delusions to anyone save me. And when you do mention them to me, you shall do so in a private setting where no one else, not even portraits, can hear of it." His tone was calm but his eyes were alive and deadly above his cup. "Have I made myself perfectly clear?"

Fuck him, fuck him, fuck him.

"Have I?" he said.

I jerked my head just enough for it to be taken as a nod. This was still a dream. Nothing would happen to me in the real world. But ... I'd never felt pain like that in a dream before, not even my worst nightmares. I didn't want to feel it again. Didn't want to feel the hot blood coursing down my face. Didn't want to watch myself set my severed eye on the table and chop it up like a tiny blob of gelatin. Didn't want to feel so _helpless_.

"Good," he said. Nodded at my cup. "Drink. It shall help." A smile touched his lips, one that held no friendliness. "Think of it as the chocolate after the Dementor."

With shaking hands, I picked up my tea. It tasted better than a knife to the eye had felt, even if I wasn't thirsty. Trying to ignore him watching me as I drank was the hard part. Eating anything was out of the question. My stomach was quivering worse than my fingers were. Both my hands and my stomach settled when I had reached the bottom of my cup. Potter made the teapot pour me a second one. It poured out steaming hot. This time, I added extra sugar. Calories didn't matter in a dream.

He leaned back, touching nothing else of his food or drink. "Let's continue our conversation," he said. "The one where I had been telling you how wrong you had been about the magical world."

"Details and generalities," I croaked. Somehow, despite the tea, my throat was still dry.

"Yes," he conceded with a nod. "Details and generalities." He waited for me to finish my tea before saying anything more. His hands, white and scarred, folded together, then drifted out of sight, presumably to rest against his lap. "British Wizards start their magical education at seventeen or eighteen, not eleven. After seven years of schooling, they have a year of apprenticeship. Upon the age of twenty-five, they are considered full-fledged wizards and are no longer bound by the rules of youth. You don't look older than me" — he examined my face so avidly that I turned my head away — "but you are. You must be, for I had specified as such in the spell that had brought you here. A witch or wizard of my blood, twenty-five or older, and suitable as my guardian." There was no hint of a smile on his face now. "The spell took a rather liberal interpretation of what 'suitable' meant, I'm afraid. You'd hardly be suitable enough to gain custody of a Kneazle, never mind a person."

Potter pursed his mouth, an oddly schoolmarmish expression. Maybe he'd picked it up from his Aunt Petunia, the cow. "There is more to it than that, but we shall save that for another time," he said. "First, I have to figure out what is wrong with you, and to do that, I'll have to be unkind again." He had his wand pointed at me before I could jump out of my chair. "Don't fret." He stood and the candles threw his shadow over me. "I won't let you remember this part if you don't want to do so. I'm not cruel."

o

When I woke, it was with him leaning over me and my teeth fuzzed over with what felt like several days' worth of gunk. My eyes squinted in the candlelight. My jaw popped when I spoke in a rusty voice. "What day is it?"

Always wanted to say that. Sounded so dramatic.

He straightened up, making a face. Was it my breath? Good. He deserved worse. "You don't know what day it was when you got here, so knowing which one it is now won't help you." He waved his wand at me several times, hitting me with half a dozen different kinds of light that must've been spells. There was the smell of flowers on my skin and the taste of mint on my teeth. No fuzz either. "I suppose that some politeness is in order, however. It's the twenty-six of July, two thousand and one. You've been here for three days, counting the one on which you had been summoned, and you've been a pain to clean after on every one of them."

Trying to sit up ended in failure. I rolled onto my side instead and propped myself onto an elbow. Progress. "If you keep prisoners, you have to maintain them."

He idly spun his wand around in one hand. It must've been a hard trick to pull off without his glasses. Maybe his eyesight wasn't that bad. Come to think of it, it hadn't been that bad in the books, had it? Everything was slightly blurry to him, but not hopelessly indistinguishable. Must've been nearsighted or something. God, I'd read that series way too much.

"So," I said. Yawned. "Did you have fun with my unconscious body?"

Anger darkened his face. "Don't be disgusting." He turned half away, folding his arms behind his back, his wand still in his left hand and still spinning. "I needed to see if you had been damaged by the spell that had brought you to me. What I had learned had been nothing more than the obvious conclusion, one that I had already come to."

The spell _he_ had used, he meant. Nice way to deflect the blame, dude. "Three days seems excessive just to reach an obvious conclusion," I said.

A muscle ticked in his jaw. He stopped spinning his wand and slipped it up a sleeve. "We are as closely matched as can be in blood." His face darkened. "Too closely matched, in fact. Not even a sister would be so close to me." He watched me from the corner of his eye. Only now, with his face in the light of the candle that was shining a short distance away from the bed, could I see the stubble on his cheeks, the shadows under his eyes. "Even a madwoman would have some break in her self-made memories, some foundation of reality. But you ... you are consistent in all of yours, even those that you don't like to remember. And the matter of our blood, the _closeness_ of it, has proved that your consistency is not that of the irrevocably insane. So yes, the conclusion was obvious."

He twisted down towards me, lightning quick. His right arm was even quicker and the hand that held my chin was like a vise. He turned my face to the light. "My opposite," he said in a soft, wondering whisper. He ignored my hand batting at his. "It is fascinating how closely aligned we are, despite the differences ..." His gaze caught on my forehead, quickly dragged down to my eyes, and then flicked aside. Pulling away, he wiped his hand on his robes as if he had touched something slimy.

I wiped off my face in the same way. "I do not look like you."

"Mad you are, but blind you are not."

I blinked at him. "What, are you fucking Yoda or something?"

He blinked back. Then scowled. "Don't bring up that Muggle rubbish. I've heard enough about that to last a lifetime."

My gaze turned around the little space that was ostensibly his bedroom in this sunless prison. It wasn't a very long look. "There aren't many people talking about it here." His scowl deepened, but that wouldn't stop me. Why quit digging when I was already so close to reaching China? "Or do you mean the people at number four, Privet Drive talk too much about 'Muggle rubbish?' "

He didn't reach for his wand but he looked as if he wanted to. "Enough. You're awake and if you're awake, you're ready."

"For what?"

"To become my guardian."

Not this again. But what choice existed? This was not going away. This was not ending. This wasn't a nightmare. My stomach twisted at that, heavy with the weight of the truth. No, this _wasn't_ a nightmare. Nightmares ended. And even if this ultimately turned out to be one of those instead of a stupendous break with reality, it might be best to start cooperating. Phantom pain still lingered in my eye no matter how many alleged days had passed since the gouging incident. Dream or not, that had felt horribly real. I nodded. "Okay," I said. "Let's get it over with."

His triumphant look lasted about three seconds before he folded it away. "Good choice."

"Did I ever really have one?"

He settled into a wooden chair not far from the edge of the bed. "What do you think?"

"That I have about as much choice in watching over you as your aunt did." The words were out before I could think to stop them. Potter didn't look angry. He had his smooth mask of vague politeness firmly in place. "So ..." I began. "How do we do this?"

Crossing his legs, he said, "You must accept me into your home."

It couldn't be that easy. My disbelief must've showed because he continued, "The protections require that I live with a person of my mother's blood, a person who has taken me into his or her care."

"I know that," I said. When he looked at me with his dagger-sharp curiosity, I added, "Dumbledore told Harry, um, I mean, you, tha —"

"If you're going to say that he explained the bond of my mother's blood to me in a series of fictional books, I would rather that you not say anything at all." Potter plucked irritably at a fold in his robes, then flattened it with the side of his hand. Plain black robes, not his school ones this time. And he had on Muggle clothes under them, not the uniform he'd worn before, but a dark suit with a waistcoat. God, he was mean and Slytherin and pretentious. This dream was one cliche after another. Maybe it was a message from my subconscious, something that would've given Jung the fits.

He said, "What I want to discuss is why you look so skeptical about something that you claim to have already known."

Tension uncoiled within me, though it didn't disappear. There was no telling what he might do to me, not after he had used the Imperius Curse. "Isn't there anything more to it?" I said. "It can't just take a few words. That's ..."

 _Ridiculous_ would've been the term for it. But could I really say that considering all the ridiculous things that had happened in the books? They'd been written with a humorous streak a mile wide, even if the overall tone of the series had darkened towards the end. Animals could be turned into teacups, jelly beans could taste like every single thing in existence, and there was a hex that made boogers turn into bats. Rowling's magic could best summed up as, "If you're looking for a rigorously defined rule system here, you're going to be disappointed, mate." So it made perfect sense — or, _non_ sense, as was really the case — for a few words to make me the guardian of Harry Potter.

He unfolded his legs, stretching them out. "You're not completely incorrect."

"Oh, thank you. How generous."

My scalding tone might as well have been silence for all it affected him. "After you make your claim as my guardian, Petunia Dursley shall have to transfer her 'care' of me to you," he said. "In that respect, it shall take more than just a few words — it shall take at least several dozen of them." He gave a flat smile.

Was that an attempt at a joke? No, I must've hallucinated that. He hadn't been hydrating me properly during my nap, that was all. This Potter wasn't Harry, with his sarcastic remarks and unflagging bravery and heart of gold.

"There's also the matter of you not precisely having a home in which to accept me."

"I'm not homeless," I said. "I have an apartment." Wait, what was I saying? This guy wasn't real and even if he was, he wasn't someone that I wanted living with me.

"You are, technically," he said, "because your flat exists in another world."

So that was the angle this dream was taking? That I'd come from a different universe or something? "Yeah, the real one," I said.

If that comment annoyed him, he didn't show it. "Even if it did exist, we couldn't live there." My skin crawled at the thought of sharing any living space with him for an extended amount of time. He must've seen that too because amusement lit his eyes. "Britain must be our place of residence until I've finished my education."

That he used _we_ and _our_ didn't bode well for me. He was already acting as if I had agreed to help him. Saying otherwise would be a bad idea — the power here sure as hell didn't rest with me, my dream or not. But I had to say something. Go down with a fight, or at least call him an asshole. Because that's what he was. A dangerous, devious, kidnapping asshole. And he needed me, so I was too valuable to kill no matter what I called him. Of course, that didn't rule out him punishing any insolence. Magic could repair a lot of damage with little effort. Like what had been done to my eye. A shiver ran through my whole body.

"You want to know why you should help me," he said.

I jolted. Heat bloomed in my face. Why was I jumping at anything that he said? This was a dream. It wasn't exactly shocking that my own brain could guess what I was thinking and twist it into one of his comments.

"Accepting me as your own isn't something that I can force you to do," he said, and I relaxed. "The transfer of blood protections shan't work if your answer is forced by magic or through coercion. It has to be willing."

Well, it seemed that I had some leverage. I took that as a sign to sit all the way up in the bed. Strength had been returning to me little by little, but every movement seemed to take a year. My spine popped in several places as I straightened my back. After taking a great, shuddering breath, I said, "What if I won't help? What if I refuse?"

"Then there isn't anything that I can do to make you say yes."

"Shouldn't you be saying you'll kill me right about now?" Really, he should be. Promises of death and pain are exactly what too many Slytherin Harrys make at times like this. Very little subtlety for a house that took pride in it.

He remained slumped in his chair like a lazy lord. "As I had said, I can't coerce you into it, not with spells, or fists, or threats." He shot forward with startling speed, leaning towards the bed. "But I can give you dire warnings about the interest that others shall have in you, a young and not unattractive woman who, by all appearances, is related to Harry Potter, a wizard who has had Voldemort himself as an enemy." The light of a candle caught on his face, sticking pinpricks of orange-red on his irises. "There wouldn't be anything that I could do if they caught you, either. And they would catch you. The Ministry of Magic keeps a close eye on any 'lunatics' who rave about magic just in case they might be wizards breaking certain important statutes ... and no matter how mental you are, you know that the Ministry is filled to the brim with Death Eaters." He kept staring at me with those green-red eyes, staring until I looked away. It was like looking at a forest fire. "You would be alone and entirely vulnerable to whoever might come your way, and I doubt that those who do shan't be offering tea and a free flat."

Potter was good. Very good. The skin had rose along my arms during that spiel of his, and that was with me knowing that this whole thing wasn't real. He was a frightening figment, one of the better ones that I'd ever had. And since I was, in reality, going to be put in the care of doctors soon, there would be no harm in going along for the ride. I'd be free of this whole awful thing and he'd meld back into the shadows of my brain.

"A free flat, you say?" I said, and watched the corners of his mouth creep upward.

Not very long afterward, we took a Portkey to some park in London, then hurried elsewhere without a second spared for me to wonder over the miracles of magic.

o

The neighborhood was clean, fashionable, and full of Muggles who looked as if they spent more on their shoes than I could make in a year. That was as much as I could gather about the place while Potter paid the cabbie. None of the residents looked at us twice as we went up the stairs to the building — before we left the basement, Potter had got rid of his robes and Transfigured my clothing into an expensive-looking outfit. As he dug jingling keys out of his trouser pockets, I said, "I'm no expert on the London real estate market, but this area looks ..."

"Posh?" he said. "It should, considering what I had paid for the block of flats."

My eyes widened. "You bought the whole block? An entire block of buildings?"

He nodded towards the place in front of us. "No, just this one block of flats. What you would call" — a brief pause — "an apartment building. Two of the flats have been let. The third shall be ours."

There was that word again. Ours. But could I really blame him for the presumption? I was here with him, wasn't I? "What did you pay for it?" I said. The price he rattled off made my eyes water. "That's — Jesus, how can you afford that? I mean, I know you're decently well-off, but you're not _that_ well off."

"My parents gave me enough for a comfortable start." He found the right key, stuck it in the lock, and twisted. "Or they would have done had I not made my own fortune before ever hearing the word 'Gringotts.' " He opened the door and stepped inside, leaving me to scramble after him.

Which I did. After shutting the door. And locking it. "You can't just leave it at that," I said. "What fortune?"

"I can leave it at that." He was also leaving behind the small entryway for a staircase that led past the ground story apartment — should probably start calling those "flats" out loud just to spare any confusion with the natives. Urgh, what am I saying? Everyone I can see in this world is just a part of my imagination. They'll be fine if I use American English ... unless, like me, they enjoy accuracy in their fiction. Okay, I should probably stick with calling pants "trousers" and bangs "fringe" just so I don't embarrass myself but what the hell am I thinking? This wasn't the time for vocabulary issues to interrupt the narrative.

"No." I went up the stairs so fast that I almost knocked into his back. "No, you can't just leave it at that, not when you've dropped that kind of backstory on me."

His step hitched the slightest bit, but made it to the next riser just fine. "Remember what I had told you about mentioning your _peculiar_ way of looking at the world?" he said in a too casual tone as he came to a stop on the second story landing. No, that was called the first story landing in Britain. First stories were above the ground story. "The middle of the staircase isn't the place for such a conversation."

The question had been rhetorical and the followup comment unnecessary. I remembered his warning perfectly, just as I remembered the knife that he had made me slip into my eye socket. He had left those memories intact. My hand trembled up to that eye, pressing at the ghostly pain throbbing there. Potter hadn't moved above me. Maybe he was waiting for an answer. "Okay," I said.

He moved on, which allowed me to do the same. The third story apartment — or second story flat, if you wanted to be all British about it — was the last stop. Our stop. He unlocked the door and let me go in first. Must've been a trick. I shuffled inside with painful slowness, narrowing my eyes at the dark, trying to discern any dangers. There was a faint sigh behind me and then Potter swept past me. Warm light flooded the room as he tore the curtains open, illuminating exactly what I hadn't expected: a good-sized sitting room empty of everything except a lumpy grey sofa and a sorry-looking side table. Well, the bare light bulb in the ceiling socket probably counted as decoration in a room like this. There was bedding bunched up on one side of the sofa, along with a pillow. Did he sleep here?

Following my gaze, he said, "I haven't had much reason to come here often. The place we had been in before is part of a magical residence, one where I can cast spells without worrying about the Trace, so it has been of more value to me." That made sense. Getting busted for underage magic wouldn't have been a good idea, especially when he was going around killing Muggles in his spare time. Potter motioned off to his right. "The kitchen is there." Now a motion to his left. "The bedrooms are over there, across from the bathroom and the toilet. Have the larger room if you wish to do; it doesn't matter where I sleep."

Images of the bed in the basement and a dingy old mattress in a cupboard flashed through my head. Yeah, it obviously didn't matter where he slept. Crappy accommodations didn't seem to bother him. Kind of weird, come to think of it. You would think that someone with his apparent fondness for fine clothes would want to sleep on something better than a glorified futon. "Are you sure?" I said.

He looked at me as if I were crazy. To be fair, there was an increasingly large possibility that I was.

I said, "If you're rich, you're probably used to better things."

His expression flattened. "Don't make assumptions of me," he said, and turned towards the windows to stare onto the street.

God, I'd been saddled with a genuine drama queen. Soon, he'd be dragging out the tale of his dark and tortured past that would make me forgive his bitchy brooding. Of all the Slytherin Harrys to end up in my hallucinations, I had to get the mysterious and mopey Byronic version. Whatever. His problems were not mine to fix. He could afford a therapist. I left him to stew and checked out the bedrooms. They were both completely empty, with little difference between them other than size. Fuck him, the bigger one _was_ mine. When I came back out, he was waiting with two thick-looking paper folders.

He thrust them in my direction, along with a ballpoint pen. "The first are documents for your new identity. The second is the agreement that shall give you the flat, for the exorbitant rent of one pound per month until I turn twenty-five."

"That's four years."

"It will be four years and four days," he said, "until I am of age in the magical world. That amount of time is unfortunately necessary."

I flipped through the first file, which proved to contain my California driver's license, a passport, social security card, my birth certificate, and other important things. "Where did you get these?" I said. "Did you go to my apartment and rob my stuff?" I paused as I found something that I didn't recognize. "I've never had a UK residence card." Nor did I ever have the other IDs and documents behind it. I stared at him over the top of the folder. "Where did you get _th_ _ese_?"

He made a rough noise that might've been a suppressed laugh. "Muggle identification isn't exactly difficult to acquire."

Okay. Nothing to worry about. This wasn't real, so I didn't have to fear forged documents made in my name. This particular card looked passable enough, even if I'd never seen a similar one in my life before. "Well," I said, "at least you took nice pictures of me." Wait a second. My eyes narrowed as I looked from one photo to another. "How did you take these? I've been asleep. And what are those clothes? Did you change me?"

"I had Transfigured your clothing," he said, "nothing more. And you hadn't been asleep for these past three days. Just for part of this one." Before a protest was halfway out of my mouth, he said, "If you'd like to relive too many hours of signing paperwork and answering my questions on your life, I can return your memories to you at once." He said that like he was committing some great act of charity.

"Why did you take them at all?"

"Because you had asked me to do exactly that."

"I don't believe you."

But that was a lie, wasn't it? There were parts of me that wanted to believe him, that did believe him. Maybe they were the parts that still remembered canon Harry or maybe they were bits of memory that hadn't been entirely ripped away, wisps of three days staining the rest of my mind. With things like the Imperius Curse and Veritaserum, there probably wasn't a thing about me that he didn't know by now. A cold shiver snaked up my spine.

_Stop being stupid. There_ _i_ _s nothing to be afraid of. Controlling minds_ _and bodies_ _, truth serums,_ _Dark Arts,_ _none of that_ _i_ _s truly possible outside dreams._ _He can't do a thing to me, not the me that matters anyway. Not the real one._

"Fine," I said. "Give me my memories."

He reached into his blazer, took something from an inner pocket. It was a small phial filled with restless liquid of a color that was like mercury mixed with mist. It was attached to a silver chain. He threw it to me.

The folders fell from my hands, scattering documents and IDs to the floor. I clapped the phial between my palms. Barely. "What's wrong with you?" I said. "What if it had fallen?"

Sounding very tired, he said, "The Unbreakable Charm on it would've lived up to its name." He nodded at my hands. "Go on then, see what you're missing," he said. "You told me that you would likely demand them, so it would be best for me to keep them close." His eyes were the only part of him that turned lively, burning with fevered curiosity. Those eyes made me shudder and look away. "I wonder if you'll be just as right about whether or not you would actually put them back."

I took the phial up with my fingers. The memories swirled lazily against the glass. They looked harmless. Beautiful even. But why had I wanted them out in the first place? There had to be some reason for it. Something that would've left me better off without them. Had he done something to me? Something that was too terrible to remember? No, why would he have kept my memories intact instead of just erasing them? And if they were that terrible and he didn't want to erase them, he would've just let them stay in my head, same as he had done with the memories of me gouging out my eye. The reason must have really been mine. Which left me with one question: What could I have wanted out of my head so badly without wanting to destroy it?

The memories struck the glass like waves battering a seaside cliff. My shaking arm drifted down to my side. Some questions didn't need answers.

Potter didn't look surprised. He took the phial from me. I was numb and still as he put the chain around my neck. "They're yours," he said, not looking at me. "Keep them with you." He then busied himself by gathering the folders and their contents from the floor, taking far longer to collect them than seemed needed.

o

o

o

[There is a purpose here, I swear it.]

[This fic was inspired by a prompt from the HPfanfiction subreddit, one that was kindly thought up by redditor Avaday_Daydream. I won't detail the exact prompt here because it might spoil a few things. If you do find it yourself, though, be warned: that idea quickly spiraled out of control (as if you couldn't have guessed that already). What would've made for a fun crackfic took a direction that surprised the hell out of me, and is probably making anyone reading this wonder what the description has to do with the actual story. Don't worry, the summary isn't a lie — this is just the setup phase. At least I didn't end with a cheap cliffhanger or anything, amirite?]


	2. The Awful Tea Party Part II

o

**Chapter** **Two**

o

The Awful Tea Party Part II

o

A little ink made his flat mine. Being my landlord, he still owned it, albeit under a fake name and a shell company, but it was my place for the next four years. Actually, it was mine until I woke up, but it was better not to mention that. He got too pissy over, well, everything involving my (correct) view on this being a fever dream. Potter was listed as my roommate on the forms. After he finished putting down that bit of information, he told me to set my documents folder into my bedroom, excluding the IDs I'd need to get around this country without a problem. I did so with as much foot dragging as I could manage. When I came back, the other folder was gone. Since I had zero desire to learn about the intricacies of the British rental system, I didn't ask what he had done with it.

I looked around the flat, taking note of what was there. The narrow kitchen had all the right appliances, but there no furniture other than the sofa and the table in the entire place, and both of those sucked. "Okay," I said, "we're going to need a few things."

"You need them," he said with distaste.

"Don't be an idiot." I would worded that more nicely nicer if I cared to. But I didn't. He really did have a fantastic glare, though. "Look, this can't really be considered a home for either of us if we don't treat it as one, right?"

He started to say something. Stopped. He looked pained for a moment, then said, "We should go. The shops should be opening right about now."

The shops were. We went to half a dozen of them without anything to show for it except a brass wall clock that would be delivered by tomorrow afternoon. By the seventh, I wanted to lay down on the sidewalk and die. Instead, I settled for folding my arms and staring at him as we stood by the curb. "What is it that you _do_ like?"

"Something tolerable," he muttered, checking his wristwatch. "Why aren't there any taxis around?"

"And tolerable would be?"

Now he checked his cell phone. Were wizards allowed to have cell phones? That seemed so ... ordinary. And could magic work around them? Electronics didn't exactly work at Hogwarts. Maybe that was just a Hogwarts thing, something built into the school's magical protections. The Blacks lived in the middle of Muggles and didn't seem to draw any unnecessary attention to their location, so that might've been the case.

He said, "I'm not sure."

Right. We were having a conversation, weren't we? I said, "How is it that you can Transfigure my clothes into the latest women's fashion but you have no clue as to what sort of nightstand you can bear looking at for more than two seconds?"

"The right clothing helps me fit into the places that I want to go. No one is having a look at where I live."

If he knew how to Transfigure dresses as pretty as the one I was currently wearing, I didn't want to know his definition of fitting in. Or maybe I would if I was ever drunk and in a mood to be murdered. Time would tell. Until then, I didn't want to be bored. And shopping for nothing was very boring indeed. Luckily for me, more shops existed in London than just the ones he had dragged me to see. I grabbed at him, then remembered who he was. My fingers shrunk back from his arm, hanging onto just the sleeve of his blazer instead. He stiffened at my touch all the same. What was I, poison? If anyone had the right to be offended at this situation, it was me, not my abductor. I stepped off the curb, attempting to tow him along with me. He didn't budge.

"Come on," I said, "let's go there."

"Go where?"

"To that place over there, across the street."

Silence. I looked back at him and found him frowning. He said, "That's an antiques shop."

"Yes, and it has some furniture. Maybe we can find something to interest you since you don't like modern or traditional or Scandinavian." Or anything at all, apparently. Ah, but there was a time for every snarky remark and this was not it. He didn't seem to appreciate humor, which was a pity. Canon Harry always had something funny to say. Potter said nothing, though he made a grand gesture by stepping down onto the road. We cut across at a lope, one that left me trailing behind him before we reached the opposite sidewalk.

How could anyone be a Quidditch player with such long legs? Not very aerodynamic of him. He reached the shop first, entering it so fast that the door nearly closed on my wrist. I snatched my arm back before I earned a bruise. He whipped around, alarmed. Who knew he could look so human? He pushed open the door. "Trying to escape?"

"No," I said, "but trying to keep up with you is trying."

There was the frown that I didn't love or miss. He made a little motion as if to say, _yes, do go on_.

"Your legs are stupid."

"I'm sorry?" he said in a way that sounded as if he was very much not.

"They look like you stole them from a giraffe. Why are you so tall?"

He hunched down, staring at me, which didn't bring him anywhere near my eye level. "I suppose that it is the same reason that you are so short — the whims of our blood." He held the door open a little farther. "Now, shall we? I should like to finish this before autumn arrives."

We went into the shop. Natural light poured through the big display windows, winking off gilded mirrors and chandeliers. There were tables, chairs, and cabinets; suits of armor, tall vases, and statues; desks, standing clocks, and tea sets. He wended his way through them at a reasonable pace. That wasn't from any consideration on his part; the shop was just so full of stuff that there wasn't a single straight line to walk except for a long open space in front of the cash register.

A round-cheeked clerk materialized from behind a set of naked bronze nymphs to ask if we were looking for anything in particular.

Subdued pleasantness entered Potter's face at once. On anyone else, it would've been a barely noticeable change; for him, it made him pass as a person. "Yes," he said, with a warmth that rooted me to the floor in pure shock, "we are looking for a few things. Do you have any —"

He named some items which the clerk said that they did have in the shop. She led us deeper into the maze, pointing out different things. Further inquiries were made on what we might be hoping to find, and further answers were given. Few words passed my lips; I was too busy watching him act like a normal member of society. He'd gone from Potter to Harry in a matter of seconds. It was as if someone else had slipped into his skin. He admitted to the clerk that he didn't know much about furniture, nor did his fiancee

(what)

but that our parents had given us a generous budget in the hopes that we could find something suitable for the new flat in the city that had been our engagement gift.

Had he done this act in the other shops? He must have; it seemed too practiced. In the others, I'd been the one to enter first, moving away from him well before any clerks came over to check on the new customers. He had seemed fine with letting me wander while he spoke with the employees, and wander I had done. I had nowhere to run, not without money or a passport on hand. Besides, I wasn't in any real danger. This was literally the shopping trip of my dreams. The worst that could happen was Potter turning out to have a taste for floral-patterned chickens or something.

What he had a taste for turned out to be classic and masculine. Extremely classic. Like "I adventure in unmapped jungles and loot tombs over the world" classic. From the ceiling fixtures to the nineteenth century Turkey carpets, his taste could be best described as Victorian gentleman's study, or steampunk without all the arbitrary gears. Well, it could be worse. We might've found everything at IKEA. Just imagining the amount of anger he'd accrue over assembling sleek bookcases and tables with those little widgets that came in their boxes made me glad for the fate I'd escaped. The decor he chose came with a thankful lack of elephant heads and colonialism, however. Kind of charming, in a way. Come to think of it, the stuff he liked looked a bit like how I had imagined the Slytherin common room and dormitories looking. I chose some similar furniture. It would've been a shame to break up a theme — and I didn't want to spend the rest of the day shopping.

While Potter and the clerk went over things like delivery dates, I wandered around, staring at this and that. A particularly elaborate chandelier interested me; it was hung low from the ceiling so that its bottom-most crystals nearly brushed the top of my head. I reached up to touch one. It turned a lazy revolution, catching the golden illumination of its own electric lights.

"No, after the thirty-first would be best," Potter was saying some distance away near the register. "We haven't any time for deliveries before that, unfortunately."

My fingers stilled on the crystal. Interesting. I'd have to ask him why he said that. It had to be for some purpose. He came to collect me as I made my way to the turn-of-the-century changing screens, but I said nothing until our shoes were pounding sidewalk again. "Why did you lie?"

He bestowed me with a long-suffering look.

"About deliveries?" I said. "A clock is being brought by tomorrow, remember?"

"How could I forget with your constant reminders?" He glanced along the street, presumably looking for a taxi. "A clock is much smaller than what we've ordered just now. I'll be needing unrestricted use of magic in order to expand the flat. Have I satisfied your curiosity?"

I nodded. Then stopped nodding. "Um ..."

He sighed. "Yes?"

"Why will it take until the thirty-first before you can freely use magic? Don't you want me to be your guardian sooner than that?"

"I haven't a choice about wait," he said. "Petunia agreed to meet you on the thirty-first. She claimed that Saturday is too soon, that Vernon has a very important meeting set this Sunday, and that Dudley wouldn't be around on Monday, so Tuesday it must be."

"Oh."

"If there isn't anything else, we really should continue."

"Continue?" I said weakly. "You mean with shopping?"

"I can't keep Transfiguring what you're wearing, can I?" Well, he could, but that was a little ... gross. Even if magic could clean things in the space of a breath, the idea of constantly wearing the same clothes made me queasy. "You need clothing," he went on. "Besides, we can still buy some other items for the flat, including bedding and plates and such, along with groceries. It's going to be four rather long days with just the two of us and no magic."

Yeah, it was. The grilles of the passing vehicles looked really inviting right about now.

o

The rest of the day passed in a blur. The only thing I could remember when I tottered up the staircase to the flat was that we had to end up hiring a minicab (apparently those were not the same as taxis, aka black cabs, were) to tote us around, and by that point, I was too tired to question how he could afford any of it. After getting more items for the flat, both furniture and household, we'd gone to several clothing shops to buy things off the rack — "These can be tailored later," Potter assured me, afterward ignoring any and all questions on his weird obsession with fashion — but the items were by no means cheap. I didn't know the exchange rate of dollars to pounds for this year (or any other, I confess), though there we spent enough to make it clear that Potter hadn't earned his money by working in a fish and chip shop.

Groceries had been far easier to buy. He didn't seem to care what I got as long as it didn't involve fish or "aubergines." Potter recommended simple things since cooking at the flat would mean cooking without the benefit of magic. I chose those simple things since I wasn't going to expend any great effort on the likes of him.

Somehow, we got through it, and had carried our obscene number of bags up to our flat. The flat. I couldn't think of it as "ours." It was my prison, nothing more. Anyway, it took three trips even with the driver helping. Potter tipped the man, then we were left alone. He didn't have the decency to let me loaf on the sofa for half a breath before telling me that the shopping needed to be put away — we had bought ice cream, after all.

What a nag. "Yes master," I said, and dragged myself up to do his bidding.

He didn't make me work alone, which was one point in his favor. No, he took off his jacket, rolled up his shirt sleeves (how he could stand such clothes in this weather, I had no idea), and put everything on the high shelves that I couldn't reach. Hm. He had one good use, it seemed.

The rest of the stuff we'd bought was deposited around the sitting room, the kitchen, or in my bedroom, depending on where it belonged. Aside from some individual food items, Potter had bought nothing strictly for his own use. He ordered takeaway for dinner, delivered straight to our building. We were both worn out from our day of spending, no matter how much he pretended to act otherwise. I left him in the sitting room where he probably slept on the sofa; I took to my room where I opened several bags of new bedding and slept in an uncomfortable heap of them on the floor.

There was less to do the next day. After breakfast, we dressed as Muggles and took a normal bus to our first destination, a small street in a cozy village full of Tudor-style cottages. We didn't stay there. Potter started walking without bothering to see if I was following. We passed by several streets before I said, "Where are we going?"

"Nowhere special," he said. "I need to pick up some of my things."

I looked around us. It seemed familiar in the way that he had seemed familiar when I had first seen him. This was a location from the books. It had to be. "Little Whinging doesn't look at all like I imagined it would."

In a bored tone, he said, "This isn't Surrey and stop thinking that any of this is a hallucination."

The lack of people around was probably the only reason he didn't get immediately pissed over my slip up. If this wasn't Surrey, then why did I somehow know it? I stared at everything we passed as we went down a side street. Between houses, I caught a glimpse of a church and its cemetery. Could it be ...? Maybe it was. When we reached the ruined cottage covered in ivy, I was sure.

"This is Godric's Hollow!" I said. "This is your house. The one where Voldemort ..." Mentioning the murder of his parents was probably not a good idea, so I shut my mouth, glancing to him to gauge his reaction.

His face was as blank as it usually was. "Yes, congratulations, you've figured it out. What gave it away? The giant sign bearing the name of the village just before we got off the bus?"

"I didn't see that; I was asleep."

"I know. Your snores are still echoing in my head." He glanced about, then started crossing the street. Not waiting for me, of course. We reached the front garden. Potter used his wand to reveal and then break what looked like a large soap bubble around the property.

Frowning, I said, "How can you do that?"

"Magic," he said.

"No, I mean, how can you use magic? Aren't you under the Trace?"

"Not here." He endured my stare as if it didn't exist at all. "This house is still listed as a magical residence, so I can do magic here without any technical violation of the Trace."

Technical was right. "Then why don't you live here?"

"I have done, but it's hardly adequate, wouldn't you say?"

There was no argument to make against that. Who would want to live in something that was half-ruin, half-monument? We passed passed through the gate and under the memorial sign. When we were over the threshold of the cottage, he sealed the barriers around the property again. We picked our way through the rubble in silence. It must've been preserved somehow because there were no signs of rot. If you ignored the spell damage and the neglect, it looked as if it could've still been livable. But there was no evidence that anyone lived in it at all. Potter stopped at wall that was covered in patterned paper. He took out his wand and, without flinching, sliced open the smallest finger of his left hand.

"What are you doing?" I said.

Potter ignored me. He pressed his smallest finger against a certain spot that didn't look very different from the rest. When he pulled back, I could see that it _was_ different. There, in the jumbled pattern of flowers and Celtic knots, were the initials L. P. and J. P. The blood dripped down to them, sucked away from the rest of the wallpaper. A rectangle appeared in the paper, one that formed a door, handle and all, out of the wall itself. He twisted the handle. The door gave way with a squeal of hinges, opening on a stairway. He lit his wand, leading me down. The creaking steps led to a tiny basement full of shelves with preserved jars and tins of food, gardening tools, and boxes of what looked like random junk. Potter streaked blood across the wall where there was a door-sized gap between the shelves. No guesses as to what appeared there next.

This second door led to a familiar space: the basement where he'd summoned me.

"Wait," I said, "why didn't we just use a Portkey to get back here?" A smile curved my lips. "You forgot to make one, didn't you?"

He headed for his sleeping area. "I hadn't forgotten anything." Potter reached under the bed, dragging out a suitcase. "Muggle transportation is less conspicuous in Muggle areas." He stood, suitcase in hand, and gave a glance around the basement. His tongue clicked against his teeth. "Right, that's it, then."

"What, that's all you're going to take?"

"Unless you wish to gather up some cobwebs for safekeeping, yes, that's all I'm taking for now. Everything else is replaceable or worthless."

"Aren't you worried about me knowing this exists?"

His mouth formed a thin, brittle smile. "This place had been a temporary bolthole, nothing more," he said. "And you do not worry me."

That answer was satisfactory enough, not to mention sincere. Only later, when we were taking another bus back to London, did I realize that he meant I wasn't _worth_ worrying about. What danger could an ordinary woman pose to a wizard who had pulled her from another world?

o

The hours between that morning and the next were the opposite of exciting. Potter entertained himself however he entertained himself in a room empty of everything except his suitcase. I walked the short hallway between our rooms frequently, hoping to catch a glimpse of what was inside whenever he opened his door, to no avail. It was the most entertainment I had until the afternoon, when he finally got tired of hearing me sigh every time he passed through the sitting room, and said, "Get up, we have somewhere to be."

"Somewhere" was a bookstore within walking distance. He told me to buy whatever caught my eye, because it was unlikely that he'd acquire a telly — they didn't last long in environments where frequent magical experimentation was to take place.

"Magical experimentation, huh?" I whispered as we moved through the stacks. "So you do have hobbies."

"Yes, and on Saturday evenings, I attend poetry readings."

His expression was completely serious but the light dancing in his eyes gave the truth away. I snorted and moved off, intent on finding something that would occupy me. He made a face when I went for the fantasy section, which gave me horrible flashbacks of our clothes shopping trip when he told me what colors my bras should be, (not that it mattered, in his opinion, since there wasn't much for them to cover in the first place). I said, "Don't complain about my tastes when you've given me free rein. This is your fault."

He folded his arms and watched me make my selections. The most he would do was roll his eyes at the cheesiest covers. His attention moved to other shelves soon enough. The bookshop did not have a single volume of anything written by J. K. Rowling, so I went to the clerk at the front counter to check. She typed the name into her computer, hit enter, and then, after a moment, shook her head. "Sorry, it doesn't look like we have anything under that name," she said, clicking away again. "Are you sure that's the right name? Maybe if we try without the initials ..."

"No, that's all right, thanks," I said, and returned to the shelves, lugging my half-full basket of books. My search wasn't very important. Just an idle curiosity and now it'd been satisfied. Rowling did not exist in my dreamworld. Which was fine. Really, it was, because she existed in the real world, the world that mattered.

Potter had drifted into nonfiction, fashion to be exact. Not a shock. He flipped through a large book with a lot of illustrations for half a minute before acknowledging my presence. "You shouldn't keep looking for things that aren't there," he murmured.

I leaned down, twisting my head around for a better look at the cover of his book. "Historical costuming?" I said. "It looks pretty."

He snapped the book shut. " 'Pretty' is not on the same level as 'useful,' I'm afraid." He put the book back on the shelf. "Have you finished?"

"Not when you haven't started."

The range of expressions he had conveying exasperation had yet to be fully plumbed, as his current look now proved. This one had a touch of annoyance, a splash of exhaustion, and a pinch of confusion.

"You should get something," I said. "You can't just spend your days playing with whatever is in your suitcase."

"I do not play —" He stopped himself, then took a breath. "Your concern's unnecessary. I've no need of the books found here."

"Hmph, we'll see about that." I set off in search of things that might interest him. He stayed in the fashion section skimming other titles until I came to get him.

o

Books could be traps. The ones I'd set out around the flat certainly were. He avoided the volumes of Pratchett in the sitting room where they lounged with covers as bright as snakes, sidestepped the Kings sitting like snares in the hallway, turned his nose up at the Hemingway stationed in the bathroom, and flung Austen back into my room after he found her perched atop his suitcase. But the enormous cookery book on baked desserts disappeared from the kitchen until Sunday.

Muggle rubbish it might be, but it was bait enough for him. I didn't say a word when someone came by the flat with a delivery of groceries, most of which contained baking items and ingredients. My tongue held as he fiddled away in the kitchen, cursing an uncooperative electric scale. Such patience was rewarded several hours later when he emerged into the sitting room wearing a chocolate smeared apron and a look of shock. He sank onto the side of the sofa opposite me and said, "We have pudding, but no dinner."

My gaze roamed over his unusually disheveled appearance. His longish hair was an unruly riot of waves and lazy curls at the best of times, but he usually made some effort with it. Right now, it looked as if he'd flown a broom through a thunderstorm. He was tidier than canon Harry too, disdaining wrinkles in his clothes or the tiniest bit of lint. Now, he had frosting on his left sleeve and across his right cheek. If he looked like that, then the kitchen must've been an unsightly plane of hell. I got up to check, confirming my suspicions. The cake, a triple-decker with shaved chocolate and an artistic dusting of cocoa powder, was the only pristine thing in sight. Beautiful, yes, but we couldn't just eat dessert. It was Sunday, a time for family meals when I'd been growing up. Usually, I'd be having dinner with Fyodor, and after that, I'd be calling home. God, everyone must've missed me.

I shook my head. Dumb thoughts. This wasn't really Sunday; it was Imaginary Sunday.

And yet my stomach rumbled. Okay, fine, I could fix that problem. A quick poke around the fridge and pantry gave me an idea of what I could make as a remedy to our ills. As dinner cooked in the oven, I cleaned up the kitchen as best I could. Cleaning wasn't my favorite and Potter had yet to buy a step stool so I could reach things without his help, so progress was slow. He came into the kitchen ten minutes later, looking at the oven, or rather, at what was sizzling inside it.

"It's not going to be anything fancy," I warned him.

"I dread what you might come up with."

"Don't insult the person making your food." I waved a cleaning rag at him. "Come on, there's something on the ceiling that needs to be taken care of." I squinted upward, canting my head. Was that ...? Yes, it was. "How the hell did you get half a bar of chocolate to stick there anyway?"

Close to an hour later, the kitchen was presentable and we had roast beef baguette sandwiches with what he insisted on calling chips on the side. No, it certainly wasn't fancy but it was tasty. It helped that the chocolate cake almost made me cry when I ate it. Potter didn't ask if that meant I was having my monthly girl problem like I thought he might, though, and that somehow felt like progress ... even if he looked at me with slightly uncomfortable suspicion for the rest of the evening.

o

Potter came out of his bedroom bearing folders the next morning, several of them, and dropped them on the coffee table in front of me. "This is your new background," he said. "It's as close as can be to your current one, so it should be relatively easy for you to remember it."

"Good morning to you too," I said, hunched over my mug of coffee. I took a sip. "You'll have to tell me someday how you managed to forge all that in a room devoid of everything except a suitcase."

He used two fingers to push the folders to rest against my mug. "The most important part of this identity is that you're the great-great-granddaughter of my great-great-granduncle, Bernard Evans."

That sounded easy enough to remember. "Is he fake?"

"No, he was, at one point, very real," Potter said. "Nowadays he is very dead, which doesn't matter." He tapped the folders. "Only the contents within these do. We'll be memorizing them." Potter turned for the kitchen, doubtlessly in need of a cup of tea. The kettle was one of the few essentials he'd actually had before I moved in.

I put my head to the table and groaned. My groan sounded a second time when he slunk back out to the sitting room to tell me that I'd be studying what was in the folders until Tuesday came.

o

Tuesday did come. The house on Privet Drive looked like every other one on the street. That was no compliment. I kept my eyes firmly on number four, certain that if I turned my head to the left or to the right that I would see the same mundane beige edifice stretching out like an endless and inescapable nightmare, each one filled with families who had two-point-four children and plastic smiles. Just staring at the neat little garden beside the neat little driveway and between the neat little hedges that separated this house from its clones set my teeth on edge. It was like someone's idea of what comfortable middle-class prosperity should be, a model house kept pristine only because no one lived there. I could already smell the aggressively lemon-scented cleanser and desperately quiet ambition from the sidewalk.

There were two things that I was sure of before stepping a foot inside: One, this house was utterly soulless, and two, Potter hadn't been raised in this place, he'd just grown up in it. If I had never read a thing about the _Harry Potter_ series, I could've drawn both those conclusions by looking at his face. He had slipped into dead silence the moment that our bus had entered Surrey. That didn't change as we took the ruler-straight walkway through the middle of the grass and to the front door. He didn't knock, so I had to.

One of the curtains in the front windows flicked. No answer. I knocked again. The door opened between my second rap and my third, answered by a broad-chested man so tall that looking up at him put a crick in my neck. This was Dudley Dursley without a doubt, and one well beyond his whale-boy years. He looked between me and Potter as if he couldn't quite understand what one of us was doing with the other. Finally, his mild blue gaze fixed on his cousin and he said, "She's, erm, you know ...?"

"A witch?" Potter said.

"No, I meant to ask if she was our cousin, but come to think of it, is she a witch? She looks so _normal_." Dudley started, his eyes betraying his thoughts by glancing at Potter's wand arm. "Sorry," he said to me, "that had been rude of me. What I meant to say was that you look, er, what's the word?"

"Muggle?" I ventured.

He smiled, which made him look less fearsome. "Yeah, Muggle. And an American one at that."

"Don't let her looks fool you," Potter said with a surprising amount of bitterness, as he headed into the doorway, "she's a freak just like me." He might have shoved the other man if Dudley hadn't already stepped aside.

When Potter passed by, Dudley extended an arm into the entryway. "Come in, please," he said. "Violet, was it? I'm Dudley, Harry's cousin."

"It's nice to meet you," I said, half-meaning it. Dudley hadn't been entirely irredeemable in the books, eventually, sort of, so I managed to give him a small smile. His parents would be another story, of course. As I moved past him, I added, "I don't really know if I'm a witch. Harry says that I am, but I haven't done any magic so far."

(But this would have been a rather lame dream if that remained the case, wouldn't it?)

He shut the door behind me. "So that would make you ... a Muggle-born witch, then? Or would you be a late-blooming one?"

My eyebrows rose involuntarily, something that he didn't miss.

"I've paid more attention to Harry and his whole magic thing more than he thinks I've done," Dudley said. If only he had paid more attention to Harry when the two of them had been younger, and not just the bullying kind. He didn't miss my slight increase in tension over that thought either, it seemed, because he suddenly looked a touch pensive. "I don't know what he's told you about us, but I think you know that we haven't been close with him."

Understatement of the year right there. "Yeah, I kind of got that impression."

"I wasn't exactly nice to him, growing up." There was a touch of apology in that, one that should've been directed at someone other than me.

Speaking with him alone should've been uncomfortable — he _had_ been a little shit to canon Harry when they were both young. It was difficult to imagine him not being mean towards someone as off-putting as this Potter was, though. But why was Dudley telling me all this? Did he want to make a good impression? Or was it some kind of latent guilt being nervously vomited out to a stranger? Judging by the warm way he looked at me, it might've been a bit of both. It wasn't a far distance to the sitting room if I remembered the layout of the house correctly, so Dudley's reluctance to leave the entryway was understandable. If we moved a little closer to our destination, it would've been easy for anyone to hear what we were saying.

"Sorry," Dudley said, rubbing the back of his neck with a hand. "This must be a bit much for you all at once — I haven't much family besides Harry and my Aunt Marge, so I wanted to explain my side of things a bit."

Family. Right. That's what I was supposed to be. Family to the Evanses, and therefore family to Petunia and her son. "I'm sorry," I said. "This is all just a little new for me."

Dudley's expression brightened. "I should hope so! It isn't everyday that you find lost relatives."

"No, it isn't," I said, attempting to sound pleasant despite my rising guilt. Lying never had sat comfortably with me. He saw me into the sitting room, which was as neat as the entryway and hall had been. There was indeed the faint scent of lemon about everything. A sofa and two over-sized armchairs surrounded a coffee table. Behind them, against the longest wall, was a sideboard dotted with porcelain figurines. Opposite that wall, a large bay window rose high behind the massive television, filling the room with the light of early evening. Directly across from the door to the hall was a fireplace complete with an unplugged electric fire. There was no clutter, no dust. Every step I took across the pristine carpet made me feel as if I was stomping down carefully maintained flowerbeds. All of that paled in comparison to what happened when Dudley stepped aside and let his parents see me.

Petunia and Vernon, who had both been sitting on the sofa with their arms crossed and their expressions closed, stared at me in open shock. Vernon uttered a soft, "Good Lord!" while his wife seemed too alarmed to say anything at all. Blood drained from her face, leaving it the color of old milk. She stood, trembling, her progress so slow that it seemed as if she were being hitched upright by an invisible rope one inch at a time. Her pale blue eyes blinked rapidly. "You look ..." She swallowed hard, the muscles straining in her throat. "God, you look so much like, so much like —" She cleared her throat. "Harry hadn't warned us ..." She paused. Her gaze roamed over my face. "Hadn't _told_ us, I had meant to say."

"I understand," I said, although I really didn't. What was she freaking out over? How much I allegedly looked like Potter?

From where he was slouched against the long wall opposite the window and the television, Potter said, "Aunt Petunia, Uncle Vernon, this is Violet Henry. Violet, these are my aunt and uncle, Petunia and Vernon Dursley."

They certainly looked it. Neither of them completely matched my idea of them from the books — Vernon was more on the beefy side of things than disgustingly corpulent, and Petunia was far less horsey. Of course, it wouldn't have made much sense for her to have been completely ugly, would it? Not when she had been related to a known beauty like Lily Potter. Maybe it had just been her terrible personality that had made her look uglier to me. The three of us exchanged a round of pleasantries while Potter did his best not to self-immolate.

Petunia invited me to sit down in one of the armchairs adjacent to the sofa, then left to go "fetch the tea," as she put it. Potter took another armchair, one that was directly across from mine as long as you didn't count the low table between us. Dudley took a spot on the sofa next to his father, which left an open place for Petunia. The Dursley men didn't say much of anything, preferring instead to watch a repeat of a soccer match on the TV. Vernon sometimes sneaked glances at me, looking somewhat bewildered each time. Potter had taken a tiny leather-backed notepad out of his light suit jacket and occasionally scribbled something in it with an equally tiny pen. I shifted my bag off my shoulder, then set it on the floor next to my chair.

One of the teams scored a goal. Dudley got to his feet, saying, "I'm going to see if Mum needs any help," and was quickly gone.

Vernon cleared his throat. Without looking at me, he said, "The boy ... Harry ... he hadn't mentioned how you make a living, Ms. Henry."

"Please, call me Violet," I said, to which he gave a nod. "I —"

"Have a degree in business communications," Potter said, still scribbling, "but she has recently transferred to London in order to work at an international translation services company."

The part about my degree was true. Everything that came after was pure bullshit. Part of the cover story. Vernon looked pleasantly surprised. "Really?" he said. "That sounds quite normal." He almost looked at Potter, his gaze veering off at the last second. "Harry," he continued, giving the name a distasteful twist, "had told us that you're like him, but that you have no use for such abnormality."

Potter hadn't worded it that way, a conclusion that was easy to draw from the pause of his pen. He just as soon started scribbling again. He looked as if he might've been biting his tongue hard enough to taste blood, though.

The faint smile I'd been holding on my face since I'd come into the sitting room threatened to fall off. Vernon was being a dick, but Potter wasn't exactly a prize at the best of times. With attitudes like theirs, it was a miracle that decades of living together in the same house hadn't ended in murder-suicide. Diplomacy was the best choice, the only choice. "I'm very new to the whole concept," I said, which was true. I'd never had a dream before where I was a _Harry Potter_ -style witch.

Vernon seemed as if he was about to say more, but Dudley and his mother had returned bearing trays, one with the tea set and the other with little plates and mini-towers of biscuits, cakes, and fairy-sized sandwiches. She hadn't known what to expect with me, but she had pulled out all the stops regardless. Her skills as a hostess always had been one of her few laudable qualities. Tea started under a strained quiet punctuated by the clinking of china and barely-audible soccer commentary.

Petunia selected to speak once everyone had settled in with their cups and plates. "We had been told that you first spoke with Harry over the internet?" she said.

"Yes, that's right," I said. "One of those ancestry websites."

Vernon's gaze slitted as he sought Potter. "I wouldn't have thought that you could use anything outside that quill and ink nonsense."

Potter smiled thinly over his cup. "I made do," he said. "Ancestry is important." He took a drink. "I've always had an interest in blood, after all."

The Dursleys turned decidedly pale at that, and maybe they had good reason for it. Potter had spent nearly twenty solid years in this house, sixteen of those undoubtedly being treated liked a powerless pariah until his letter had come. The hate had probably become less pointed after he got his wand, but it had been a long time for all of them. After a fortifying sip of my tea, I said, "It was good luck that I found all of you. Potter — I mean, Harry — he recognized one of the photos I'd posted online and told me that my great-great-grandfather was his great-great-granduncle, and, well, things just took off from there."

"Is that why you had taken up a career in London?" Petunia said.

I nodded, my face heating with the lie. Having a philandering boss meant that I quickly got used to lying, but I usually did so over the phone to his wife. "Yes," I said. "I know that it was a bit, um, presumptive of me, but I couldn't help it, I ..." God, these people were being so nice to me. Petunia was looking at me with a tentative softness in her gaze. Was I really going to feed them this stupid cover story? Potter's cool eyes focused on me; his chin dipped in a subtle nod. I had no choice. "I'm an orphan." The Dursleys blinked in surprise; it seemed that Potter hadn't told them the entire story of my fictional life. "Since the accident, all I've had are photo albums and old family journals, which are a poor substitute for the real thing, so when I found out that I had people in this world" — my voice quavered as Petunia's expression warmed further — "I just had to meet them."

Potter looked approving and I looked to my tea. His approval made uneasiness slosh around in my stomach. The conversation moved to mundane things like hobbies, marital status, living accommodations — the Dursleys reactions were nothing but favorable when they learned where my new flat was located.

"There must be good money in translating things for foreigners," Vernon said.

"There's certainly money in it," I said quickly, hoping to change the topic. If the Dursleys had certain opinions about magical people, I was wary about knowing their opinions on "foreigners." And the less I had to lie about my fake life, the less lies that needed to be kept track of.

When tea had concluded, Petunia announced that she was going to do the washing up, after which she gave me a hopeful look. I offered to help, an offer that she gladly took. We went to the kitchen where we put away whatever leftovers there were, then tackled the dishes. I insisted on doing the actual scrubbing since she'd gone through so much effort for me, a decision that was partly made out of guilt. No matter what the Dursleys were like, they'd opened their home to me. And it wouldn't do to be rude when Potter needed them to transfer the blood protections. If I fucked things up, he wouldn't be happy. There was little chance of Petunia not agreeing to that, of course. There was no way that the Dursleys would want to keep him around for four more years. Dishes were the least that I could do to help the process go smoothly. Dishes, and lying. I plunged into the sudsy water, my hands and forearms protected by a formidable pair of thick, yellow rubber gloves.

Petunia took up the clean dishes that I set in the empty right-hand basin, drying them with a stout dish cloth, then stacking them on the counter. The plates and spoons were the easy part because the cups and saucers had to be washed one at a time since they were so dear. She had proudly informed me that they were Wedgwood, which Vernon had bought for their last anniversary.

That seemed to require some comment, so I turned one of the pale, delicate cups around and said, "They're lovely." They really were.

She smiled, which softened the angular edges of her face. I'd been wrong when I'd read about her, imagined her. No, Petunia Dursley wasn't an ugly woman, though I could see how unpleasantness would make her seem so. That wasn't to say that she was beautiful, or even pretty. More striking than anything else, an attractiveness that could look harsh in one light and remarkable in another, made up of hard angles and startlingly large eyes. She must've been awkward when she'd been growing up. It was little wonder that she had been jealous of her sister — in the single photograph that Potter had grudgingly showed me of his parents, Lily had ethereally pale skin and striking coloring. She had also been about a head shorter than James, whom she had been standing next to in the image, and that would've made her considerably smaller than her older sister. Delicate, like a little white teacup in comparison to a sturdy sugar pot.

Throughout the washing of the dishes, Petunia sneaked looks at me in the same way that her husband had, looks full of curiosity and, oddly, something sad. When she noticed me noticing what she had been doing, she glanced away and sighed. "I'm sorry," she said, setting down the last plate on the small stack of them. "I've been staring, I know that I have been, but you just look so much like her."

"So much like who?"

"Lily."

A saucer almost slipped from my hands. I carefully set it into the other basin. "I look like Lily?" I had seen Lily for myself and hadn't noticed any similarity, not really. "Potter — Harry — he said that he and I looked alike, which I suppose I can see. But Lily? No, she was ..."

"Pretty," Petunia said, in a tone that was pained and wistful at once. "Beautiful." Her gaze drifted to my face once more. "Harry hadn't been wrong to say that you looked like him. Married couples often do have some resemblance to one another, and his parents were no exception." She gave a faded smile. "Vernon and I have some resemblance as well, in the lines of our jaws, the shapes of our noses. Like is attracted to like, you know."

"Is it?" I said. "That must be nice, finding someone who mirrors you."

" 'Finding someone who mirrors you' — what a good way to put it."

The genuineness of her words put a hotter blush in my cheeks than lying to her had done. I started in on the rest of the teacups. Before we had begun washing anything, Petunia had told me that they would need a gentle touch. I kept that in mind as I cleaned.

Petunia said, "You're clever too, just like she had been." She took up a saucer, patting it dry in an absent-minded way. "If I hadn't known any better, I might've thought you were her daughter, even if the color of your hair and your eyes are just like his."

"Harry's?" His first name sounded so odd in my mouth. The name Harry belonged to a boy with the heart of a lion, not the venom of a snake.

"No," she said, a slightly sour note creeping in, "her husband's."

My stomach gave a nervous flip. There was no reason for it, really. Plenty of people had black hair and hazel eyes. Some of them were even fans of the _Harry Potter_ series. If I looked anything like some of the characters in the story, that was only because I had imagined them that way. A lot of readers probably imagined characters looking a bit like themselves or those that they knew. "It must be strange seeing me," I said.

"Strange, yes, but not unpleasant. If only Harry had been a girl; things might've turned out ..." She bit her lip, then shook her head. Her expression turned serious and she set aside everything to take me by the arm, her fingers pressing into my flesh. "You are sure about this, aren't you? About taking him in?" Her gaze darted to the doorway, skittering back to me when she found the space empty. "He's not ... he's not normal."

"Of course he isn't; he's a wizard."

"No, I hadn't meant that. The boy, he says things, does things that, that, that worry me, do you understand?" Her fingers pressed harder. "They've had me worried for years. Not just worried. Afraid."

Despite the two cups of tea I'd had earlier, my mouth was parched now. "Afraid of what?" I said in a dry whisper. Afraid, perhaps, of what an angry young man might do with a wand and a grudge? Understandable. He'd done enough to me with the Imperius Curse and a butter knife. But I had no reason to be afraid of him, not when I was the one dreaming of him. The other people in my nightmare had reason though, since they were set dressing. "You don't need to worry about me," I said, "or you. He can't do anything without me."

Her fingers relaxed. "Thank God," she said, exhaling heavily. "When he had told us that you were like him, that you were one of _them_ , I had felt sorry for you. But then ... then I had hoped that you might be able to do something about him, to keep him from being so" — her lips tightened together for a moment — "cold." She drew my closest hand out of the dishwater so she could take it in both of hers, not seeming to care about the water dripping all over the place. "You can keep a watch on him, can't you? Perhaps you might even be able to make him be normal in the way that we couldn't do."

"Normal? You mean Muggle? There isn't really a way to keep anyone from using magic if they have it."

She shook her head. "Normal as in a normal person. Normal as in how Lily was normal, despite her ... her magic. Harry, he isn't like her. He isn't even like his father had been. James Potter had tried his best to be agreeable, at least. But Harry ..."

Whatever warning she was going to give trailed off into nothingness. That was fine. I knew what she was trying to say, and also knew that she could never guess the true extent of the danger he presented. At a bare minimum, Harry Potter was a lying misanthrope who used blood rituals to summon forth women that he didn't mind mutilating when they did something that annoyed him. Slytherin Harrys: If they weren't busy being whiny bottoms to some murderous Dark Wizard scum, then they were murderous Dark Wizard scum who made Ted Bundy seem like a dream date. There was a bit of crossover, though, I supposed. Fan fic could be pretty fucked in the head sometimes. Looking at the bright side, I'd ended up with one that didn't whine all that much. Angst was never really my favorite thing to read, anyway. Or, in this case, dream.

Petunia stared at me, seemingly waiting for something. Oh. Right.

Giving her an assuring smile — which might not have been that great; it wasn't as if I practiced in in a mirror — I then said, "You don't need to worry. He really can't do anything without me."

Her expression lightened. My words comforted her more than they had comforted me — he was going to be my flatmate for the next four years, after all.

o

The exchange of the blood protections took less than five minutes to complete. Most of that involved Potter explaining how it would work: that I was going to take him into my home and my care, and that Petunia was releasing him to said home and care. Nothing happened when she and I finished saying such things, so everyone turned to look at Potter. He had gone back to his spot against the sitting room wall rather than his armchair, and was scribbling in his notepad again.

"Is that all that had to be done?" Vernon said. "A few bloody words?"

"No," Potter said, "it was a few bloody words from a person who shares my mother's blood."

Vernon fixed Potter with a fierce glare, but he sounded calm. "You'll be leaving, shall you?"

Potter underlined something several times, then closed the notepad, which he slipped into his jacket. "I shall be." He straightened up, shoving off the wall. "Once I gather my things, there should be no reason for us to come in contact with each other every again — barring, of course, Violet's untimely death." If that was a joke, no one except him was smiling. "I'll be going upstairs, then."

I rose from my chair. "Wait, I'll come with you." A foolish offer, but when stuck between small talk and a known murderer, I knew which I'd rather face.

He frowned, but didn't object. His silence held well after we went up to the first story and into his bedroom. He opened the door, let me pass under his arm before he entered, and shut the door behind him. It was a tidy room that smelled of the old books that lined the two plain shelves on the walls. Faded but intact wallpaper — featuring, absurdly, blue and white ducklings, was the only real decoration. In canon, this had been Dudley's "second bedroom" before Harry had moved out of the cupboard under the stairs. If the wallpaper and awful white furniture was anything to go by, it had started life as a nursery. It must've been stripped of anything comforting or nice before Petunia had moved him into it. There wasn't even a rug on the hardwood floor. Had I not known who lived here, I would've said that it was a disused spare room kept for guests that no one wanted to stick around.

Only the dark, handsome trunk at the end of the narrow bed held any character, and it was for this that Potter headed. He looked at his watch, checking the time, then he drew his wand from his sleeve. " _Lumos_ ," he said. Silver-white light, a color that looked like moonlight, glowed at the tip of his wand. The sunset slanting through the windows somewhat diminished the prettiness of it. Even so, it was gorgeous, like a star that had dropped wearily from the sky to have a rest on his wand. I'd have to ask him to cast the spell later when it was dark so I could see the full effect. He dismissed the light and sat on the edge of his bed.

When he didn't do anything else and gave no sign of talking, I said, "So, um, why did you want to come up here again?"

"Again?" he said. "I hadn't mentioned 'why' before, so there's no way that I could possibly mention it again."

I almost snorted a laugh. His comment hadn't deserved one. It wasn't that funny. Huh. If he had started sounding amusing, did that mean that Stockholm Syndrome had a grip on me? Could it set in so quickly? Maybe it'd been sped along by the chocolate cake. "Don't be pedantic."

His dead-eyed stare might've worked on anyone who hadn't seen him act like a zombie without at least two cups of sweet, milky tea in the morning to rev his engines. He knew it wasn't working either because he finally said, "We're waiting to see if I get an owl for misuse of underage magic."

"Oh, okay." I shuffled over to him, cherishing the alarmed look he gave when I sat at the head of the neat-as-a-pin bed. The mattress squealed and sagged with our combined weight, but thankfully held. There was nothing to look at in this room except him or the sun. I chose to observe the daylight disappear.

After the sky turned a summery dark purple, he used spell light once more to check his wristwatch.

"Are you sure you can do magic now?" I said.

He dropped his arm and stood. "If they haven't sent a letter after half an hour, it's not going to be sent." He made his way to his trunk, then tapped it with his wand. The trunk's straps came undone, the lid springing open as soon as it was able. Another flick of his wand opened his wardrobe. Clothes erupted out of the drawers, flinging themselves into the seemingly bottomless interior of the trunk. When a pair of expensive-looking brown oxfords floated lazily behind the last pair of trousers, Potter started spelling certain books off the shelves to join the rest of his items. What remained were a few stray volumes and some old clothing that looked several sizes too large for him. A final tap of his wand made the trunk shut itself, tighten its leather straps, and then shrink to the size of a matchbox. He plucked it off the floor and tucked it into one of his trousers pockets. Throughout this production, the end of his wand stayed lit.

"Is that everything?" I said.

"Anything important or noteworthy is elsewhere," he said.

"What about Hedwig?"

He ambled towards the door. "Unless you're talking about the thirteenth century witch who specialized in goblin slaying, I don't know who or what that is."

"Hedwig, your owl. About yea big." I held out my hands for reference. "Snowy white feathers. Ring any bells?"

"No," he said, and extinguished the light with a rather tart _Nox_. A car backfired somewhere close by, obnoxiously loud. "We should get going — now."

"But —"

"We shan't be staying here any longer."

"What are you talking about? They invited us to stay for dinner."

His laugh wasn't pleasant. "Give my your hand. We can Apparate."

The few times that he had touched me had felt like examinations, the kind where a scientist was turning over an interesting specimen. I wasn't any any rush to touch him voluntarily. "My purse is downstairs."

"Leave it," he said.

"It has my ID in it and some of that family history stuff. I thought that Petunia might have ques —"

He swore.

"What is your problem?" I stared sidelong at him in the gloom, one that was cut by a streetlamp a short distance outside. His eyes were wide and afraid and made him seem much younger than he was. "What is wrong with y —" The answer rippled over me as a chill, as if I'd just been pushed into a frigid lake. God, why hadn't I thought of it before? Why hadn't I asked him about it or protested it or something? "The protections," I said, "they're gone from this house."

"Yes, of course they are," he said. "What else had you thought transferring the blood protections had meant?"

"They're gone and the Dursleys are vulnerable."

"Fuck the Dursleys."

My palms itched to slap him. Maybe that would put some sense into him. "Was that your plan in the first place? To fuck them over? Because they could die if anyone finds out where they live."

Potter snatched my hand and tugged me to him so hard that I slammed into his chest. He snarled down at me, "Unless you've gone deaf and missed the sound of Apparition a moment ago, someone _has_ found out where they live."

"Then we can't leave them to face whatever's coming."

Several more gunshot sounds cracked outside. He opened the door with the twitch of his wand. "It's too late to avoid that." He dragged me downstairs, ignoring every protest and curse I gave him, his hand biting my wrist. He led the way back to the sitting room where he picked my purse up from the floor. An overhead fixture had been flipped on, filling the space with warm light. Petunia, who was closing the curtains behind the TV, left them half-open when she saw us. "Are you leaving?" she said, her eyes flicking between the two of us. Her breath came out in a puff of white air. She reached for it as if she might have been able to catch it.

Vernon pulled himself from the sofa, face reddening, and Dudley followed suit. His breath was steaming too. All of ours was. "What's the meaning of this, boy?" he said.

Potter started to say something when the front windows exploded inward. Something sharp and hard glanced off my right cheek, carving pain wherever it touched. Screams echoed in my ears, one very shrill from the direction of Petunia. It had to be her, not that I could tell. The light had burst above at the same time the windows had. Potter's hand was still tight around my wrist and it grew tighter. He swore again.

"Wh-what is it?" I said, teeth chattering in the sudden and bitter cold flooding the house.

"I can't Apparate," he whispered. "Whoever came must've put up spells against it."

"If this is your doing, boy," Vernon said, trying very hard to sound booming despite his fear, "I'll wring your damned ne —"

The light that was left, that of the streetlamp and the distant stars, was sucked out of the world. The air turned from bitter to needle-sharp, so cold that it stopped my breath for a moment. Silence tore away the little sounds of a summer evening, a silence so complete that my ears crackled with their own inner static to make up for the lack of other noise. A desiccated, whispering breeze came through the broken windows, a diseased death rattle full of dust and ice. Whatever had come for us stood right outside, waiting.

Someone gave a low, terrified moan, one that sounded like a wail in the muffling quiet. Potter's hand released my wrist only to search for my fingers. The strength of his grip made tears spring to my eyes. I squeezed back just as hard.

A second whisper joined the first.

This was ... this had to be ...

A third joined now and it was hard to think, hard to even breathe. Voices filled my head, a jumbled chorus of shrieks and spells and terrible secrets that should've stayed unspoken. A sickening, sweet-sour stink filled the air and clogged my throat. The stench of death. _Do you really think that happiness is possible for you?_ said a soft terrible voice in my head. _In a world such as this?_

_"Expecto patronum,"_ Potter said, and it was not the brave cry of Harry but a hoarse, desperate whisper. Moon-colored mist flared from the end of his wand, illuminating the frightened faces, his included; illuminating our blood and our scratches; illuminating the trio of dark, ragged _things_ that pressed into the jagged glass maw of the windows, leaning like long shadows towards us with grasping and skeletal hands.

The light disappeared and I screamed. It was the sound of another person.

_"Expecto patronum."_

Stronger light filled the room now, a cloud instead of a mist. It drifted towards the Dementors, making them snap their arms back from the Dursleys, dropping their quarry to the floor.

_Do you really think that happiness is possible for you? In a world such as this?_

No, not it wasn't possible. It would never be possible, not in this world or in any other. It had been once, when my friends were still —

My friends. Yes, my friends. The thought of them was a small, shivering candle against the endless cold gnawing at me. But it was enough. The hope of a brighter light that might be kindled. I twisted against Potter, reaching for his hand that held the wand. Our eyes met before the light of his last spell faded. "Happy," I said in a raw whisper, and in the sightless dark, I felt his arm lift, taking mine with it, and he said, he said, he said


	3. The Chocolate After the Dementors

o

Chapter Three

o

**The Chocolate After the Dementors**

o

_"Expecto patronum!"_

Sometimes, the greatest things can come from the smallest ones. Like a phoenix hatching from an obsidian egg in the heart of a volcano, a tiny speck of hope turning into its own shining sun, or, in this case, a small, silvery spider growing to the size of a man's fist. The spider didn't stop there. It kept growing until the starlight glow of it burned in the dark, until its bristly legs reached from one side of the room to the other, until it was so bright that I could close my eyes and still see the shape of it burning through the lids.

An Acromantula. Potter's Patronus was an Acromantula. It was so huge that its back brushed the ceiling in a spark-filled haze. It ran at the front windows, slamming itself halfway through them. The Dementors flew back in a blur, ripping the oppressive cold away like a blanket. Summer air filled my lungs again. Potter took in a harsh breath next to me. The Patronus stood where it was a moment longer, restlessly twitching its legs. When nothing challenged it, the ghostly form retreated into the house. It stood over us, then slowly dissolved into a massive swirl of silver dust.

The streetlamp flickered back to life outside, dropping its light over an empty street. Curtains up and down the street were open, filling with their own wavering light as the neighbors' recovered their power. Faces pressed out, most of them looking in our direction. The TV, tipped on its side, started bleating senselessly about local news to the carpet.

I pulled from Potter, finally realizing how closely we were pressed together now that the warmth had returned to my body. He didn't say a word when I asked if he was all right. His gaze was elsewhere, focused on the Dursleys. All three of them stared up at the ceiling, unblinking, unseeing in the electric glow of the television. The rise and fall of their chests were barely discernible. "Are they ...?" I began, but I already knew.

"As good as," he said tonelessly. He reached down for my purse, which had been dropped sometime during the attack, and pushed it into my hands. When it kept falling from my trembling fingers, he shrunk it and stuck it into one of his pockets.

"We have to ... we have to ..."

"Help them?" He shook his head, his hair spilling into his eyes. "They're beyond it. Even you know that."

"No, we have to contact someone. Dumbledore. He'll —"

A short, harsh laugh erupted from him. "Merlin, you _are_ mad." He took my hand in his own calloused one. "What we have to do is leave. If whoever is out there is worth a bent Sickle, they'll be watching the doors, front and back ... but there's one place they won't be looking." He pulled me into the hallway, heading for the cupboard under the stairs. It wasn't as full of junk as I thought it might be, but it was a tight fit for the two of us once he'd slammed the door shut.

I kept seeing the Dursleys on the floor. Their horrible, open eyes. The slack faces. That didn't change when he turned on the overhead light. "What are we doing here?" I said, my voice sounding far away.

He rummaged in his trouser pockets until he came up with the shrunken trunk. He opened it with a twitch of his fingers and nothing more. "We — or rather I — am coming up with a plan to get us out of here." Another few twitches of his fingers drew some tiny objects from the trunk. Two looked like misshapen dolls made of some dark, reddish material and the third was unmistakably a broom. He closed the trunk, then snatched these three objects out of the air. "You do like being alive, don't you?"

"Your only family members are dead. Shouldn't you be a little more —"

"Contrite? Stricken? Weepy?" he said. He stuffed the trunk into his jacket this time. "Don't lecture me on how I should feel about them. You of all people should know not to do that."

I turned my head from him in disgust. Why had I expected anything better of him? My eyes stayed pointedly off whatever he was doing to his toys. It may have involved blood at some point; I tried not to look as the coppery scent of it became oppressive in the small space. The light buzzed above us, blinking intermittently. When he was done, he turned off the light with a bloodied hand. He shifted slightly on the cardboard box beside mine and eased the cupboard door open. He threw something down the hall towards the kitchen, then threw another something towards the front door. Both hit hard surfaces with the soft _tink-tink-tink_ of pebbles over a sidewalk. Potter stilled, maybe listening for something that might've been in the dark. Nothing answered. He whispered in a language I didn't know. The rasp of those alien syllables raised the flesh on the backs of my arms all the same.

Two new sounds came now, each at opposite sides of the house in the directions of whatever he had thrown. Two large thumps. Two soft and large somethings hitting the floor. To our right, one of those somethings stood, its silhouette blocking most of the streetlamp light filtering through the window of the front door. It was a man, a tall, thin one. There was something terribly familiar about him too. He opened the door halfway and the light caught on his face: it was Potter.

My breath hitched. The Potter next to me set a staying hand on my arm, one that was wet with something I didn't want to think too long about. Leaning forward, I saw that a second silhouette was moving towards the kitchen door. That one was harder to see since there was much less light at that part of the house.

"Don't make a noise," my Potter said, his words fluttering against the side of my face. "You'll give away our position." A quick succession of spells followed, sparking faintly in the dark, most of which healed his arm, which he'd cut open in several places. Two more spells cleaned his blood from the both of us and the chain of the light above. The final bit of magic was different altogether. With his wand tip glowing white, he tapped my head. It felt as if he'd dropped something cold and slimy onto my head, a feeling that slithered all the way down my spine. He then twirled his wand around as if he were wrapping himself in a shroud and disappeared. Where he had been, the light and shadows bent strangely, unnaturally, like a mirror that had been altered to fit around his body. He gave a short, sharp whistle.

The two silhouettes opened their respective doors. Potter shut ours after he gently nudged me back into the cupboard, a sensation that was far stranger when I couldn't see either of our bodies. He said something and a bead of spell light dropped from his wand, rolling through the gap under the cupboard door. He grabbed me without warning, bracing the both of us in a spell that felt like soft cotton. The entire house rocked as if struck by a brief and tremendous earthquake. The cocoon of cotton dissipated soon after.

We disentangled and were out of the cupboard before I could ask him what the hell he thought he was doing. He cast another spell, one that barely illuminated his purpose: he had enlarged the broom and turned it translucent. Not invisible, but more as if it had been made of almost clear glass. It would've been easy to see what he was doing without spell light — the glow of streetlamps and stars poured through the place where part of the ceiling and upper story had been.

He straddled the broom, then turned to grab at my sleeve. I stepped out of his grasp and got behind him. Sitting down, I had the strangest sensation of there being a comfortable cushion beneath me, though my fingers passed through the same space unimpeded. I tried gripping the broom at first, but I couldn't trust my shaking hands to keep their hold on such a narrow thing. His waist, I'd have to hug his waist. His back stiffened at my touch but he didn't protest it. Together, we rose steadily upward.

My first instinct was to squeeze my eyes shut. I fought it. We moved through the enormous, circular gap and into air, far above the lingering smells of death and ice that the Dementors had left in their wake. Only when I was out of it had I recognized the cloying stink existed in the first place. It clung to me, to him, even as we cleared the roof.

Potter edged the broom forward, peering cautiously towards the street. His copy was creeping to the neighboring garden, hunkered down in the shadows. I couldn't take my eyes off it. Once it reached the hedge dividing the two properties, it dragged itself upright. Several spells flashed from half a dozen directions, some as close as the sidewalk and some as far as the other side of the street. We weren't the only invisible ones creeping around tonight. Another similar light display started at the back of the Dursleys' house. Potter pushed off the roof, urging us over to the house on the right. He pulled up against the sky several houses away. We pressed so fast into the night that the stars blurred above us.

o

One long broom flight, an illegal Portkey, and several Apparition jumps later, we came to a small park located in a city that didn't seem to be London. Potter removed the Disillusionment Charms from both of us. He inspected me for defects first, healing the cut on my cheek and several other places. After he'd healed his own injuries, he dug my purse out of his pocket and returning it to regular size. "There's a pub across the road," he said, nodding in that direction. "I'll bring you there and you can have a drink or two as you wait."

I blinked up at him, uncomprehending.

He waggled my purse at me, but I didn't want to touch it. I didn't want anything except for this nightmare to be over with. "This is the part where you ask me, 'As I wait for what?' " he said, carefully pushing my arm through the straps the bag. "And this is where I tell you that you shall be waiting for me to come back."

Potter was going? He was leaving me somewhere? Was he fucking crazy? No, stupid question, one I already had the answer to. "No," I said. "You're not leaving me in ass-end of nowhere by myself without protection."

He sucked his teeth as he fixed me with a considering look. "I can remedy one part of that, I suppose." He pulled something out of his waistcoat pocket: three phials full of an ugly brown liquid. "Whatever you splash that on is not going to have a pleasant time afterwards."

"What is it?" I said, taking them. "And how do you have so many things in your pockets?"

"It's an all-purpose stain cleaner used for potions cleanup —"

"That doesn't sound very useful."

"— when diluted by drops to the gallon. Use it in the concentrated form if you want to see interesting things happen to people who bother you."

His definition of "interesting" wasn't mine, so the alleged stain cleaner had to be potent beyond all reckoning. I dropped two of the phials into my purse and palmed the other. It'd be best to keep one at the ready after what had happened on Privet Drive. From the number of spells that had struck his copy, a lot of people wanted to find him. Had those attackers also brought the Dementors? With all the differences between this dream and canon, it was hard to say.

He slung an arm around my shoulder, steering me towards the golden light of the pub. "As for my pockets: magic."

"That's not an answer," I said, trying to shrug him off.

My feeble efforts didn't shake his grip. "Fewer people shall be interested in you if they think you're taken."

"If anyone's interested in me, I'll break a beer bottle and carve them up with it."

We stepped from the grass and onto the sidewalk. "That's the spirit," he said.

o

To keep up appearances, Potter got an ale for himself and a "whatever, I don't care, just make sure it's alcohol" for me, the latter of which proved to be something so dark that it looked like a glass of crude oil. He sat beside me. I took one sip of my drink and pushed it away.

He said, "Don't care for Guinness, do you?"

If that was Guinness, I never wanted it again. "I have taste buds, so no," I said, my words coming out duller than I'd intended. Couldn't help it. Try as I might to act normally, there wasn't anything normal about this situation. And being funny felt like blasphemy. My heart just wasn't in it.

Shifting his glass my way, he said, "Here, wash out your mouth with my ale. I've something that needs to be done." He started to slide out of the booth and I snared his sleeve. He glanced at me from the corner of his eye. "I'm checking on the flat," he explained. "If anyone has found where I really live, it's better that you're not there."

If that was meant to soothe me, it failed. "Will you come back?" I said, the words almost catching like a hook in my throat. It felt like a question I'd been forever asking ... I looked into his dark eyes — yes, dark, green but dark all the same — waiting for him to say something.

"I have a habit of doing that," he said.

My breath froze in my lungs and a strange coldness numbed the rest of me. It felt like the only answer he could've given me. With what might have been his version of comfort, he gently pried my fingers from his sleeve. He was out of the pub and gone into the night before I could think to go after him. Seconds later, there was the small thunderclap of his Disapparition.

He returned for me on my second glass of Guinness.

o

Potter had proclaimed me too drunk for Apparition (great risk of splinching, apparently) and use of a Portkey (wouldn't be able to stick the landing) and so half-carried me to the first taxi that we saw, a yellow one. "Aren't these supposed to be black?" I said as he poured me into the backseat.

"Not in this city," he said, and clambered in after me.

The trip to the train station was a blur, as was our railway journey to London. Most of it passed in a near stupor, one filled with sightless, pale blue eyes. I jerked awake to find myself next to Potter in yet another taxi, leaning on him as if he were a pillow. He didn't say a word as I pulled back from him, wiping at my mouth. There was a little patch of drool on his shoulder. "Sorry," I said. He twitched irritably when I tried to clean it off. With little better to do, I looked out my window. Early morning was fading the dark dirty-purple sky to grey.

When we got to our flat, I tried my best to get up the stairs. Really, I did. But there were so many of them and they just kept _moving_. Had he enchanted them? That wasn't fair. I clasped the railing and waited for the world to stop spinning. Potter grabbed me up and carried me the rest of the way, muttering the whole time about witches who had the constitution of house-elves. My eyes fluttered shut before he managed to get his wand out of his sleeve and unlock the door.

I woke up in the dark, in what felt like a bed. Not an awful, thin mattress in the corner of a basement, not a lumpy sofa, not a pile of bedding on the floor, but a normal, real bed. It had to be my bed. I'd woken up. Actually woken up. I flailed a hand to my right, missing the bedside lamp that should've been there. My heart leaped. This wasn't my bed. Okay. That didn't mean anything. It could be a bed somewhere else, at Fyodor's maybe or, or, or —

Or a bed in a mental hospital. Yeah, that was a distinct possibility, one that wouldn't go away if I just sat here. I gulped down my fear and sat up. Something brushed against me as I swung my legs out of bed. It felt like robes or a cloak or —

_Calm down. It's nothing. Just a curtain._ My fingers slid over the smooth, heavy fabric. A bed curtain. My bed didn't have curtains. Neither did Fyodor's. This had to be a hospital then, one with a weird sense of style. Bed curtains had to be a strangling risk for lunatics. By shuffling in the dark, arms outstretched, I found what felt like a nightstand tucked against the wall next to the bed. The top of it was bare except for something made out of metal. A light flared to life: a candle burning in a holder. Blue candlelight. It illuminated a familiar room, one that had been a lot smaller the last time I'd seen it, the big bedroom in my imaginary London flat.

I sank down on quivering legs, crouching so close to the floor that I could feel the cold of the wood radiating against my bare shins. Bare? Looking down, I found myself clad in some kind of shift-type nightgown, an old-fashioned one that ended at my knees. Where the hell had this thing come from? No, what I should really be asking is why I hadn't woken up in the real world. Answers wouldn't come by me sitting here and crying over things. I straightened to my full height, took up the candle holder, and headed for the door.

The hallway had been extended by several feet. The flooring looked different too, wide boards of light golden-red wood that continued into my room and well beyond it. The boring, beige wallpaper had been exchanged for silver and coal-colored willow branches that sat above handsome mahogany wainscoting. The flat was icier than it had any right to be in summer, icy enough to draw goosebumps out of my flesh. I left the hall behind, moving my free arm over my chest in a poor attempt to hold onto some warmth. The willow wallpaper continued here, covering an altered sitting room occupied by a four-door china display full of beautiful tea sets; a love seat covered in tufted black fabric pricked with silver thread stars; a side table topped by pale grey marble, with vines and serpents twisting up the sinuous, wheeled-tipped legs; a bookcase with glazed sliding doors filled with title after title; a roll top secretary desk in the distant corner by the closed airing cupboard; various smaller tables scattered about; a full-sized sofa that matched the smaller one; a thick-topped, rectangular coffee table with sensual, carved dryads for legs; and two deep, emerald-upholstered armchairs that bracketed the hearth. Most of those were the things we'd ordered at the antique shop.

They weren't the only new things. The once-narrow fireplace was now wide enough for me to have comfortably tucked myself into it; a low, red fire glowed within. A knot of wood burst from the heat of the flames, making me jump.

A shadow shifted in the right-hand armchair. "Awake, are you?" said Potter.

"You know that I am."

He shifted again and I was hit with two familiar spells, the ones that left me smelling like flowers and tasting mint.

"Ask permission before you do stuff like that to me," I said, rubbing a the back of a hand against my mouth.

"There's no room for politeness when I can smell old Guinness seeping through your pores." A small, scratchy noise, like a page being turned, came from his direction. "You've been asleep a day and a half, by the way."

I slipped around the furniture, drawn by the warmth of the fireplace. "You've been decorating while I was out."

"Yes," he said. "The bookshop had a number of helpful volumes on interior design, and I had time to spare." He didn't look up from his new, large book when I sank gratefully into the empty armchair. Nothing at all seemed to have changed about him. No, he just sat there in his neat clothes and a stupid waistcoat and slid his fingers over photographs of well-appointed rooms as if nothing had happened.

"How can you be so callous?" I said.

He turned another page. "About?"

Was he really going to pretend now, of all times, that he didn't know what I was talking about? My teeth ground together. "The Dursleys are dead. _We_ nearly died. Don't either of those things bother you?"

"What's done is done. Fretting over it shan't do any good."

"Yeah,"I said, and the trembling of my legs now shivered up to the rest of my body. "All of this must make you happy. Was the thought of them dead the one that finally lighted your Patronus?"

The covers of the book slammed together so loudly that I nearly clapped my hands over my ears. He stared into the fire, jaw clenching and unclenching as if he were keeping himself from saying something. He shot to his feet, dropping the book to a small table at his right. Off into the kitchen he stalked, stomping the whole way like the giant child he was.

A shaky breath left me, one I had been holding since he had stood. He would frighten me like that often in our early days. Every gesture that was too quick, every word that was too sharp, they all seemed to hold the threat of violence. You must be wondering, whoever is reading this, why I didn't leave or fight back or yell. I'll ask you something: Have you ever escaped yourself? Won a fight against yourself? Changed your worst habits with a few words? If you have, you're a better person than I am and you have no right to ask why I didn't do "anything" again. Some things are impossible, even in dreams.

But I shall let you know one thing — I soon learned how I frightened him right back.

o

He returned with two mugs that let off banners of steam, handing one off to me. I eyed the dark liquid with suspicion until he returned to his chair and said, "It's chocolate."

"Is it poisoned?" I said, and took a drink, half-hoping that it was. The only thing it was laced with was cinnamon and nutmeg. Each sip seemed to lighten the terrible cold that had clung to my bones ever since I got up. The intermittent shivers lessened until they were gone, and the room felt tolerably cool instead of bitterly cold. I uncurled my legs from the seat of my chair, pointing my feet at the fire.

Potter's gaze tripped over my white calves before he flinched away from the sight. He said, "You were drunk and then you refused to wake up, so I couldn't get you to take any chocolate, drinking or otherwise." He sunk back, hiding his face in the shadows thrown by his chair. "The chill that you've been feeling is a lingering effect —"

"Of the Dementors," I said, and took another drink. The chocolate warmed me all the way down to my stomach. "I know."

"There's plenty that you don't, which is why we'll have to visit Diagon Alley in the morning."

"What do I need there? Robes?" Saying that reminded me of something. "And where did you get this nightgown, anyway? I know I didn't get one the other day."

"In my line of work it's vital to keep items for nearly every contingency."

I plucked at my lap, pulling up the soft cream-colored fabric. "Is that your way of passing this off as something that an old girlfriend didn't leave behind?" Although I couldn't see him, he was probably frowning. "And what _is_ your line of work, anyway?"

His arm lifted, bringing his cup into the shadows where he was hiding. "We don't know one another well enough to share secrets like that."

"Something illegal, I'll bet," I muttered into my chocolate. "You Slytherin Harrys are all the same. Can't you ever be anything different than a thief or a hitman?"

His laugh was brief and low. "Why, I am different," he said. "I'm just a simple tailor."

My eyes narrowed. "Was that a _DS9_ reference?"

He refused to tell, no matter how many times I asked him that evening.

o

The next day, we took a bus to Charing Cross Road, and afterward walked to our final destination, which proved to be a dingy little pub wedged between two shops, one that Muggles had no chance of seeing. Well, that was one question answered. Huzzah, I was a real witch. What a shock.

The inside of the pub was shadowy and worn, crowded nearly wall to wall with low tables. Potter and I ordered tea and coffee, respectively, before setting off for a spot in the corner. After he sat, I had to squeeze my way around him. Potter had Transfigured himself into a portly, middle-aged witch before we had Apparated to our bus stop. Using what he had earlier claimed to be a spare wand, he now turned his own light jacket into thin outer robes robes, then turned my long jacket into plain, open one that rested over my skirt and blouse.

This didn't seem to draw any attention from the other patrons; a few of the witches and wizards who came through the Muggle side of the pub Transfigured articles of their clothing into more native ones or reversed Transfigurations that were already in place. Catching me watching, Potter said in a prim, Dublin-laced voice, "What had you expected to see, my dear, our kind coming in from London wearing bathing suits with stovepipe trousers and Wellies?"

That'd been alarmingly close to what I had expected to see, but I wasn't going to tell him that. I drank my coffee instead. "Don't call me your 'dear' anything." I spaced my sentences with a smile. "It gives me the creeps, Mom."

He made an irritated noise in his throat, sounding ever bit the stodgy old witch he was trying to be. That sourness probably wasn't an act. When we finished soaking in the local atmosphere — and the local gossip, such as it was — we moved on. You can guess where we went first, I should think: robes shopping. It was about as exciting as it sounded; the overlong session of measuring and fabric discussions sullied whatever thrill I'd had by stepping into Diagon Alley. For the people passing by outside the windows of Madam Malkin's, this was just another day. And, in a way, it was the same for me too. I'd been here again and again through the years when I'd read the books.

It wasn't our only stop, unfortunately. Potter insisted on buying what he called "standard supplies for any witch," supplies that included a cauldron, potions ingredients, an enormous trunk, and more books than I'd ever read in a year.

"You can't honestly think I need all this," I said as he weighed me down with yet another textbook for those interested in remedial spellcasting. This was the second bookshop of the day.

"I do not think that you need it," he said. "I know that you do." His gaze skipped along the shelves until he found another one that he unceremoniously dropped on the heap of them I was already carrying.

Craning my neck, I read the title: _Magical Customs for Late-Bloomers_. "Oh, come on," I said, my arms groaning with the weight of yet another volume. "You can tell me everything I need to know."

He was already back to hunting the titles. "Even if I were in possession of a Time-Turner, I couldn't possibly manage that, my sweet little pigeon."

My nose wrinkled at the new nickname. The mouth of his temporary body ticked into a smile. He was enjoying this. Torturing me. Got off on it, in all likelihood, the twisted maniac. I said, "Should you really be in this good a mood after everything that happened to your family?"

His mirth slipped away instantly. "We can't change it."

"But you can go around on a spending spree afterwards, can you?"

His fingers, thin and frail in this form, stilled as he reached for another book. "This 'spending spree,' as you put it, is for your own good," he said. "You're as good as useless when it comes to magic right now." He yanked the book from the shelf, then dropped it so hard on the stack that I almost lost my grip on the whole thing. "If you don't want to _also_ be as good as dead, you'll take the things that I'm buying and use them." He looked at me sidelong. Besides his eye, the rest of his face was in the shadows of his hat and widow's veil. "This is how I'm protecting the last of my blood in this world."

Those words rocked me like a strong spell. Had he really come to think that much of me? My hopeful confusion evaporated in an instant. God, that was fucking stupid. No, he hadn't. He was only protecting something that he found useful, far more useful than the Dursleys had ever been ... not to mention complicit and compliant. But someday — four years from now to be exact — he wouldn't have a use for me any longer. He'd be twenty-five, a full wizard in the magical world. So maybe it'd be best if I did learn magic. I'd need it to end up not-dead, one way or the other.

I shrugged the books up higher against my body. "Fine," I said. "I'll use every damn thing you buy me."

Smug satisfaction filled his expression before he could fix his face. Hubris had been the undoing of many a man. Potter might turn out to be no exception.

o

The wand was last on the list. Garrick Ollivander was just as ethereal as I'd expected, with quick, silvery eyes that saw too much. Or maybe I was just being paranoid. It was hard to say when Potter the Terrible hadn't allowed me a second's rest since the Leaky Cauldron. As Ollivander measured my wand arm, he asked questions of me that Potter answered. Our cover story was that I was a late-blooming witch who had come into my own only a week ago.

"Strange," Ollivander said, and I stiffened.

God, this wasn't an important moment to the half-assed plot of this dream at all. "What's strange?" I said. Did he somehow know who I was?

He straightened his back. His measuring tape, floating in midair, rolled itself into a neat coil and drifted into his hand. "Your accents," he said, glancing to Potter, then to me. "You must've grown up overseas, Ms. Henry."

Potter gave a smile that looked forced, as if an old witch were trying her best to be polite. "You're correct, of course," he said. "My family is ... old-fashioned, to put it kindly. It had been necessary to bring up my daughter in a more accepting environment. But when Violet's magic made itself known, I decided that it would be safe to come home." He paused, looking abashed. "Or as close to home as I could allow myself to go."

"I understand perfectly, Madam Henry," Ollivander said. He gave brief look to the wand Potter carried, not his Holly one, but something that was allegedly a spare. "If I might hazard a guess, I'd say that your wand appears to be ... fir. Sometimes the tendency for wand woods runs in families, so we shall start there, I should think."

Fir wands might as well have been sticks for all I didn't manage to do with them. There had been a few lazy sparks with some redwood, an anemic bubble or two from several blackthorns, and a disastrous belch of smoke from a willow wand that Ollivander quickly snatched out of my hands. "I had thought ..." he began, then cleared his throat. "No, no, of course that wouldn't have done for you. Perhaps something a bit more unusual ..."

There was a minor success with a black walnut that gave off a flurry of sparrows, a success quickly dampened when their feathers started burning. Ollivander Vanished them before their crisp little bodies hit the floor. Potter grabbed the wand away from me first, while the wandmaker started muttering things about black walnut being ill-suited for inner conflict. "But I think that there might be something to the dragon heartstring," he commented. His gaze roved over my face. "And ... perhaps ... Yes, that might do. There would be a symmetry to it, in a way." After an apology, Ollivander sent back all the useless wands lined on his counter so he could freely totter into his labyrinthine shelves. The shadows swallowed him up.

Potter took his flask from his purse and had a drink. "Of course you'd be difficult," he said.

"Yes, _of course_ ," I said. "How else could we increase the tension of this scene?"

His eyes narrowed but he didn't say anything else — couldn't say anything else, for Ollivander had returned with a single box. The wandmaker set it with near reverence on the counter; the surface of the box was a dark, plain wood that had been scuffed and dented so thoroughly that it had at first seemed to be covered in abstract carvings. The lid creaked on its hinges. Inside, resting on a cushion of indigo velvet, was a thin, plain wand the color of blood stains. I recoiled, and the beams of late afternoon light shifted to show that the wood was only a deep red-gold. It was beautiful, though looking at it still brought a touch of unease. But it was just a wand. A stick. A piece of wood. There could be no harm in touching it.

The surface was smooth and cold, far colder than wood had any right to be. And it felt right, as if my hand had been expecting the weight of it every day of my life. Snow flurries burst from the tip, scattering over the shop in a blizzard of biting cold. "What is it?" I said softly, unable to take my eyes from the wand. Magic, I'd done magic.

Ollivander looked neither pleased nor displeased. "Dragon heartstring," he said, as snowflakes fell and clung in his white hair, "and yew."

My heart plummeted. I wanted to drop the wand. Wanted to let it go. Wanted to wipe my hands clean because I knew, I _knew_ what this meant. It could mean nothing else.

"Yew?" Potter said, with a strain of curiosity I'd come to know and loathe.

"Yes," Ollivander said, "yew heartwood, and of a particularly auspicious tree — one that had been struck by lightning in nineteen hundred and twenty-six." He fixed his gaze on my wand. "A bolt during a winter storm. Quite unusual. It was that very unusualness that had led me to collect what wood I could from the remains." His gaze shifted to me now; he stared at me with those dreadful, unblinking eyes. "The tree had been a strange specimen to begin with, nearly two thousand years old. A church had been built near it, though the site had long been sacred to those who had come before the Christians. Muggles had buried their dead in its shade, you see."

A graveyard tree, one infused with nutrients from corpses, had been made into a wand. That was what I held in my hand, a dead thing meant to make more dead things. My flesh prickled as the last of the snow fell over me, but it was not the cold that chilled me.

Ollivander talked on, either not noticing my reaction or not caring. "It was of that same tree that I had made another wand" — _don't say it, please don't say it_ — "one that belongs to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named."

"Give her another," Potter said, hoarsely. "Something else. Something better."

"We both know how futile that would be. The wand chooses the witch." Ollivander Vanished the snow; his shop and shelves looked no worse for the flurry. "Go to another shop if you must, but I daresay that you shall not find a better match for your girl than this. Few other wands would manifest so strong a reaction for her, not even if the one that she now holds was to be destroyed. Some things are simply fated to be, young man."

Potter started, reaching for his wand before he checked himself. "I'm hardly a 'man,' Mr. Ollivander," he said, "as you can see for yourself."

The old wandmaker smiled and it was a gleaming, worn crescent that brought out the melancholy in his ancient face. "I see many things, but most of all, I see the souls of things, their very centers. Their cores, you might say." His shadow darkened to the color of pitch as he spoke, going against the light to stretch higher and higher against the shelves behind him. Its edges grew jagged, as if a thousand sharp and invisible teeth had burst out of his skin.

The sight filled me with an awful buzzing, as if a million insects had crawled down my throat and into my stomach. His teeth looked sharper too when he spoke. "That goes for wizards as well as wands, so if you are indeed considering wiping my memory of this encounter, Mr. Potter, then I am bound to inform you that others have tried and failed to do the same." He grinned, the silver of his eyes tarnished and dead and old. His face stretched more than any human's could, but despite the sheer unreality, the _impossibility_ of it, he looked more real than anything in the rest of the world did. Solid. Undeniable. Unchanging.

Potter didn't stop himself from taking up his wand now.

In a tone that might've been at home on a vicar, Ollivander said, "Please don't be foolish," and there was the sound of a thousand other men in it, each one as commanding as the last. "You have so much ahead of you, do you not? So many years planned ..."

Potter dropped his arm to his side, his face bloodless. Ollivander's shadow promptly dwindled to something normal-looking. He shuffled more closely to his counter, where he leaned heavily. Plucking a quill from its holder next to an ink pot, he said, "That shall be eight Galleons; prices have gone up since you first purchased yours, I'm afraid." He marked the number without asking if it was to be paid.

Eight Galleons were handed over without a peep. Potter didn't need to drag me to the door; I was headed for it before the coins left his money pouch. "The hell was that?" I said as he caught up with me.

His brow creased. "I'm not sure."

"How can you not be su —"

_"H_ _ey_ _!"_

That voice brought us both up short, me for the familiarity of it and Potter for God knew what reason why. "You don't know him," Potter said to me, taking the phial of memories from my blouse, "and you don't know Harry Potter from anything besides the newspapers." He tapped his wand to the phial, then said a hushed spell. "Remember that." He tucked the phial back into my blouse. "You don't know me and you don't know him."

"I don't know who?" I said.

That question soon had an answer — Sirius Black burst out of the milling customers surrounding the front of Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlor. It was him from the black hair to the cool grey eyes. He cut through the late crowds like a dagger. He shoved Potter from me and grabbed the front of my robes. He wrenched me to him, anger burning in his face. "What in fuck's name have you done?" he said, twisting harder into my clothes. When I lifted my wand, he yanked it out of my hand. He might as well have pulled off my arm with it, vulnerable as it left me feeling.

I took a gulping breath, one that did nothing to push down my rising panic. Potter slipped into a growing formation of bystanders, loudly promising to contact the authorities. My hands went for the one holding my robes, trying to pry it off. "I don't — why are you —"

Sirius dragged me so close to him that I could feel his heart hammering through his thin chest. "Stop playing innocent, Harry," he said, leaning down to speak against my cheek. His voice was low and terrible. "The Dursleys are dead and you're prancing around Diagon Alley wearing your mother's face?" He gave me a shake. "You do realize how all this makes you look, don't you?"

"I'm n-not ... I'm not Harry."

"Sirius?" said another man, one I knew too. If I had looked at him, I would've seen concerned etched in every inch of his kind, tired face. "Merlin, what are you doing? Let her go."

"It's him," Sirius spat.

A pink-haired woman appeared on Sirius's right side, staring at me speculatively. " _Him_ -him, you mean? Or him as in —"

"The boy," Sirius said.

Remus began, "That's r —"

"Ridiculous?" Sirius pulled me around, almost shoving me at his friend. "Look at that face and tell me what you see because it certainly isn't funny to me."

Two ice cream cones fell out of Remus's hands and splatted against the cobblestone street. Behind us, Tonks said plaintively, "Oh no, and those took twenty bloody minutes to buy."

o

We Disapparated to a place that I recognized, one full of grubby, run-down terraced houses that seemed to have more shattered windows than intact ones. No one peeked outside to watch our approach, at least not that I could tell. Maybe in this area the residents knew better than to be curious about things that sounded like gunshots. Firearms might be restricted in Britain, but they weren't nonexistent. They seemed like they should've been required here, though, maybe passed out when you passed through. I had no weapon, not even my wand. Although I didn't have it long, its absence already gnawed at me. Sirius, still hanging onto my robes, frogmarched me out of the tiny park and across the road. Remus and Tonks, who'd Side-Along Apparated together, rushed to catch us.

"Take it easy now, Sirius," Remus said, frowning. "There's no reason to drag her — _him_ — around like that, not when we haven't heard his side of things."

Sirius didn't loosen his grip a bit. "I'll drag him until his feet wear down to bloody bones if that's what it takes."

Tonks chewed her lip. "Is it really him?" she said. "It is, isn't it?"

"I'm not anyone but me," I said, and earned another shake for my troubles.

"Save it," Sirius said.

I rolled my eyes. If it wasn't one crazy asshole in my life, it was another. We continued on, not that I had a choice. Number twelve, Grimmauld Place popped into existence between its neighbors as we approached. The front of it looked slightly less dirty than the others and the red door seemed recently painted. We passed into the house without a single pause; Tonks had used her wand to open the handle-less door before we reached it. The interior was gloomy and shabby but well-scrubbed. There was a faint whiff of cleaning spells in the somewhat stuffy atmosphere. Our journey took us past a long hallway covered with portraits on either side, the largest of which was covered with curtains. I held my breath as we passed it, wary of making the faintest sound. Things were bad enough without having to listen to a dead, old racist bitch screech on about Mudbloods and half-breeds. The only other thing of mention were the serpents on the peeling wallpaper, serpents in the silver frames of the paintings, the metal serpents in the chandelier, and the serpents decorating everything else imaginable. A previous owner or two might've had a hard-on for snakes. Almost everything here was covered in them. Well, except for the umbrella stand that Tonks gave a wide berth to. In that case, someone had allowed a hairy troll leg to spoil the theme of the decor.

Once clear of the entry hall, we hooked right, then took another right down a set of narrow stone stairs. What waited at the bottom of them was an enormous, gloomy kitchen. Sirius steered me to the table, forcing me to sit on one of the benches. There followed several minutes in which the three of my captors tried to dispel the enchantments and Transfigurations that they imagined covered every inch of me. Mostly, it was boring and harmless.

Potter couldn't have known this had been waiting for me. No, he had just left me to my fate. Hadn't even held on to me tightly. Just let me slip, let me be captured.

God, what was wrong with me? He'd captured me first. Technically, these people were the rescue party. And they were also mistaken pricks, but they seemed slightly less dangerous than Potter did. None of them had made me gouge out an eye so far, which was a plus.

"Right," Tonks said, standing back. She stuck her wand behind an ear. "If this is Harry, he's either a secret Metamorphmagus or he's using Polyjuice." She dropped to the bench next to me. "Nothing to do for the first and little to do for the second except wait it out."

Sirius's expression curdled. Couldn't wait to see what he looked like when the non-existent potion didn't wear off. That would be be a treat. Seemingly oblivious to his friend's mood, Remus started puttering around the kitchen, using magic to set up a kettle on a range. Hob. Whatever it was called. Sirius said, "What are you doing?"

Remus didn't miss a beat. "Making tea."

"Making tea? At a time like this? For him?" Offense laced Sirius's voice.

It didn't bother Remus. He brought down mugs from one of the shelves. "No," he said evenly, "for all of us."

"He doesn't deserve tea," Sirius grumbled. His petulance made him look like a big, looming man-baby. Which he was. What other kind of person but a man-baby would be stingy with tea? Even the actual, not-me Potter would have merited tea, it was just common courtesy. Denying tea in Britain was, like, a high crime or something.

Happily for me, Remus continued ignored Sirius's mutterings. The tea was had, with biscuits. The tea was delicious. The tea did wonderful things to my insides. How could it taste so good? I moaned after the first drink, which did not go unnoticed. Sirius glanced down at his mug in suspicion, Tonks looked amused, and Remus looked alarmed. "Sorry," I said, "this is just the best tea I've ever had from a kidnapper and I'd like to marry you for it. Before you say no, just understand that I have a reasonable tea-to-sex exchange rate."

Tonks inhaled tea and choked.

Maybe I'd been a bit too honest in my praise.

"Kidnapper?" Remus said, looking ill. "I'm not ... I haven't ... We haven't ..."

"What he meant to say," Sirius began, "is that we've apprehended you, not abducted you." He squinted at me. "But why are you acting so strangely?" He glanced to Remus. "What exactly did you give him?"

"Oh," I said, "you drugged my tea? That makes sense. You wouldn't be very good 'apprehenders' if you weren't willing to be underhanded." Of course, funky tea paled a bit in comparison to Potter's tactics, but I didn't need to volunteer information unnecessarily. They should have to work a little bit for it. "Veritaserum, I assume?"

Sirius took an angry gulp of his tea. I didn't know the act of drinking could be angry. "Stop playing games, Harry. We need to know what happened with the Dursleys."

"My name isn't Harry," I said. Relief flooded me — it seemed I could sidestep statements that weren't direct questions.

My three _apprehenders_ shared startled, guilty looks. So far, they were better hosts than they were interrogators. Their lack of finesse almost had me nostalgic for Potter's methods. Yes, he was so far off his rocker that he'd been catapulted into space, but he didn't pretend concern about my welfare. Everything he had done to me or for me had ultimately been to further his own goals. I knew where I stood with him. He was consistent. These people pulled in three different directions, so I wobbled off-balance, unsure of where to step next.

"You're not Harry?" Sirius said, brow furrowing. "Harry James Potter?"

"Nope," I said straight into my mug as I prepared to take another drink. The tea really was that good. Looking to Remus, I said, "What have you done to make this tea so sexy?"

High color dusted his scarred cheeks. His face was half-frozen, half-pained. He stammered for what seemed a full minute before managing to say, "I'm, I'm, I'm sorry?"

Only Sirius seemed remotely amused by this, despite his diminishing rage. Tonks had her lips pressed so closely together that they had disappeared. That was good. Making comments was the way to figure them out. To find where I could push, where I couldn't. To find where I stood. To find my next step. Potter had offered no true solid ground, just sharp points to avoid. These people though ... these people were feelings first, logic second. I could tell them everything that had happened to me and they might believe me, grudgingly ...

But I wanted to see what would happen next. How Potter would handle it, how these people would handle it, how I would. I wanted to see that. All of it.

"Tea from a kidnapper," Remus said. Everyone looked at him. "You said that tea had been the best you've ever had from a kidnapper." He set his mug carefully down. "You can't have been lying when you said that, not with the Veritaserum. And your reactions, they're all wrong." His eyes, a keen amber, focused on mine. "You aren't afraid. Why aren't you afraid?"

Sirius had set aside his mug and now had his wand out. Tonks had done the same thing. Both of them were dressed in near-identical plain brown robes which pinged some old memory of mine. It was probably something Potter had mentioned, probably when he was boring me to death with facts of the magical world at breakfast. No matter what had caused it, the reason for the robes was no doubt tied to the Auror badges on their hips. Huh. Well, that was interesting. "Yeah," Sirius said, noticing where I was looking, "why aren't you afraid?"

It was strange that I felt like smiling. I said, "Because there's nothing you can do to me that hasn't been done," and the words felt as if someone else had given them.

Remus flinched. The two Aurors didn't look any more comfortable. Someone started to say something, but the sharp, sudden claw of some unseen monster hooked into my guts and pulled

(... ripped)

me away

(...... far, far away)

into

(......... churning chaos)

a familiar sitting room, where I tumbled to the floor with indignation and spilled tea. Potter sat ensconced in his usual armchair, reading a book like he hadn't just abandoned me in Diagon Alley. His pure lack of concern radiated through his Polyjuice disguise. "And how was your afternoon?" he said.

"Oh, fine," I told him. "Just fine. And I'm fine too, by the way."

"It couldn't have been all that bad," he said, turning a page. "They gave you tea."

I pulled myself up to sit, then looked mournfully at said tea now decorating the floor. The mug was intact, but my precious drink? Alas. "That's not necessarily true," I said. "You gave me tea the first time we met, then you gave me a lesson on how to properly gouge out an eye."

"Fair point." He lazily reached for his wand on the table at his elbow with characteristic Potter indolence — unnerving to see that on another person — and then cleaned up the mess. He frowned at me thoughtfully before cleaning me up too. "Veritaserum?"

My eyes were still on my now-empty mug. "Yes."

"Is it still in effect?" After I said yes, he said, "What did you tell them?" I told him everything, even without him asking. He didn't seem worried, even when I added that they had my wand. "You've done as well as I expected you might do," he said, answering now in his own voice, for he'd changed back to his usual terrible self sometime durning story hour. "I'll buy you another one."

An image of falling snow filled my head. Another wand wouldn't be the same. But telling me that I'd done as well as he'd expected me to? That made it sound as if ... as if ...

"Did you want me to get caught?" I said, staggering to my feet, mug forgotten on the floor. My hand flew up to my neck, yanking the phial free of my blouse. "You must've because you turned this into a Portkey." I stalked towards him, shaking the phial. The memories splatted against the glass, leaving shimmery streaks as they slid back down. "That was your plan, wasn't it?"

He smiled that thin, awful smile of his and my hand flew out. The slap of it was a thunderbolt. It was a long time before any other sound seemed to touch my ears. He set his book aside so he could pry my palm from his face. The raw-looking ghosts of my fingers already marred his skin. He threaded his fingers through mine with the tenacious, sickening gentleness of a lover and looked straight up into my eyes. "My plan," he said, "had been to see what would happen when you were set loose."

And like that, the anger dimmed in me. It still burned, though not as brightly. His curiosity wasn't that far off from my own, the curiosity that had kept me calm when three people from the Order of the Phoenix had stolen me off the street, the curiosity that had kept me sane in this nightmare, the curiosity to see what would happen next. His had been part of some game to see if I was loyal to him or something. I was less loyal and more suicidal. But the part that I really hated was that, for a few minutes, I had felt utterly alone without him. "Are you happy with what you've seen?" I said.

Potter released my hand. He returned to his book, which had fallen off his leg and to the side of his chair. "Happiness," he said, at once finding the place he'd left off reading, "doesn't matter."

I stalked off, no longer willing to look at him, and headed for the bathroom. It took some time before I scrubbed the feel of his face off my palm.

o

Dinner looked as if it'd been liberated from a restaurant with at least two Michelin stars, which rated as an apology as far as Potter could give them. It was a good attempt at one, as he claimed it was twelve courses. _Twelve_. Were twelve courses really necessary? Thank God they were tiny or else I wouldn't have survived them. It was over our small clay bowls of chilled Vichyssoise that I said, "So, what gave you a taste for luxury? A desperate childhood that turned you to crime?"

"I wouldn't call it desperate," he said, "but yes."

Color me skeptical at his sudden honesty. I took up my last bit of soup and sucked the spoon clean. Company not withstanding, everything about dinner had been wonderful so far. "Harry Potter as a criminal. How does that work?"

"Well enough." He eyed my empty bowl, then flicked his wand, exchanging one course for the next. No, he couldn't have stolen these, not for one course to have followed the other. He might've used some "persuasion" on a chef, likely the same sort of persuasion that had led to my eye getting acquainted with a knife. "It's the only valuable thing the Dursleys had ever taught me."

"And now you're the valuable one. Should I be flattered you're spending so much on me?"

"We both know that I'm not doing it out of the goodness of my heart. I need your help."

"My 'help?' How could you need my help in anything?"

"Many things," he said, "not just one. But the most important shall be helping me collect the Deathly Hallows, a task that shall be made much simpler once Voldemort is killed."

My appetite died away with such ease. "There's nothing simple about killing Voldemort."

"Not without a plan, no. But you have given me that plan." That was news to me. He had read that thought on my face because he said, "Or rather your memories have done." Potter picked up his fork, one of too many at his place setting, and started in on the little piece of bloody lamb at the center of his plate.


End file.
